


Rocketship Voyager

by Odon



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Action/Adventure, Gen, Uber
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-11-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:07:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 50,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26418445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Odon/pseuds/Odon
Summary: First serialized in the 1954 September to November editions of "Incredible Tales of Scientific Wonder", here is the classic space opera that inspired the 1990's UPN television series.
Relationships: Chakotay/Kathryn Janeway, Tom Paris/B'Elanna Torres
Comments: 5
Kudos: 20





	1. First of Three Parts

Title: Rocketship Voyager

Author: Odon

Fandom: Star Trek Voyager

Rated: PG-13. Adventure.

Summary: First serialized in the 1954 September to November editions of "Incredible Tales of Scientific Wonder", here is the classic space opera that inspired the 1990's UPN television series.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction using characters from _Star Trek: Voyager_ which is the property of...well I can't be bothered rewriting this disclaimer every time they split or merge, so just look it up. Excerpts are quoted from "Lost in the Stars" by Kurt Weill, "Mr. Sandman" by Pat Ballard, "Divine Comedy" by Dante Alighieri, "Desiderata" by Max Ehrmann, and the Jataka Tales. This story is written for entertainment purposes only, and no financial profit will be received for this work.

Send feedback to odon05@hotmail.com. Archiving is welcome, but please try and contact me first. My thanks to Dark Tidings for the beta work.

* * *

**ROCKETSHIP VOYAGER**

**A thrilling Tale of Transgalactic Adventure by K. C. Hunter.**

**_First_ ** _of Three Parts._

_Once they had been bitter enemies. Now they were stranded on the far side of the galaxy, and must work together to survive!_

**Chapter I: FASTER THAN LIGHT**

Through the trackless void between Jupiter and Mars hurtled the cigar-shaped vessel that was _UNRS Voyager_. A thousand feet of gleaming hull and glowering rocket-tubes, sleek gun blisters and swept-back wings, spinning radar dishes and slender antennae. A vessel built for peace but ready for war, now halfway from one to the other.

Buried deep within the rocketship was the control-room known (for reasons lost in the vanished past of the pre-Atomic era) as the Bridge. At the helm was Tom Paris, a dashingly handsome Space Lieutenant with a bold shock of sandy-blonde hair. His steady hands gripped the control and thrust levers; his earphones were attuned to the maneuvers relayed from Astrogation.

To his left sat Hyun Kim, a callow ensign from the megacities of Pan-Asia whose almond-shaped eyes took swift readings from the electroptical board that monitored everything from life-support systems to hull integrity. An alteration in the oxygen-helium mix of the synthetic atmosphere, a shift in balance off the rocket's axis of thrust, a flux in the electromagnetic fields of the Cochrane Drive: all could spell disaster if not reacted to decisively.

Around them was a horseshoe-shaped array of scopes and telescreens, where commtechs scanned the electromagnetic spectrum and radarmen kept an omni-directional watch for any rocketship or meteorite. But it was the man lying on an acceleration couch with his eyes closed to the distracting sight of those screens who first detected the danger. Tech Lieutenant TuV'k—whose dark skin and sharply-pointed ears presented a satanic visage to those unfamiliar with the serenity and mental discipline of a Martian Adept—wore the copper skullcap of an eloptic field amplifier on his shaven head, wired into the Hieronymus Machine that projected his extrasensory perception across the immensity of Outer Space.

"Object on intercept course," he warned. "Mr. Kim, sound General Quarters."

 _"GENERAL QUARTERS! GENERAL QUARTERS!"_ blared the bullhorns on every deck of _Voyager_. _"ALL HANDS MAN YOUR BATTLE STATIONS! OBJECT ON INTERCEPT COURSE! SET MATERIAL CONDITION ZEBRA THROUGHOUT THE SHIP!"_

Men and women tumbled from capsules where they had been resting after months of combat and raced for their assigned station. Those already on duty strapped on safety webbing or anchored themselves on the handgrips recessed into every surface—an essential feature on a space-vessel which could change in an instant from constant acceleration to the weightlessness of free-fall. As each compartment was manned its collision-hatches were sealed, isolating them in case of a catastrophic hull breach.

"Captain on the Bridge!" someone announced. A scuttle-hatch in the deckplates had swung upward to reveal a bouffant of Titian hair surmounting grayish-blue eyes that scanned the Bridge the moment they came level with the tween-deck. Fingers tipped with clear-polished nails gripped a handhold, and with a practiced movement a slender figure sprung onto the deck: a handsome woman in her late-thirties, the austerity of her space-black uniform failing to conceal the feminine curvature underneath. She had the short stature of a veteran spacer, and her voice cracked with the authority of one used to command.

"Tactical Psionics, report!" ordered Captain Kathryn Janeway.

"Unknown object approaching incredibly fast," replied TuV'k. "Gun batteries loaded and radar-locked. A-missiles primed in tubes Three, Five and Seven."

"Adjust our heading, Mr. Paris. See if it follows. Ship's status, Mr. Kim?"

"All decks secure, ma'am. All stations manned and ready."

"The object is altering course," said the Senior Radarman, peering into the hood of his scope. "Matching velocities with us. That's no meteorite."

"Steady as you go, Mr. Paris." Captain Janeway strapped herself into an acceleration couch, swung the lap console over her chest and keyed the intercraft. "Bridge to Astrogation, give us a look at our visitor. It seems determined to have a look at us, after all."

Thermoscopes and electronic telescopes tracked and locked on target, and the resulting image relayed to the telescreens on the Bridge. Magnification was unnecessary: the intruder Brobdingnagian in its dimensions. At first they could not comprehend what they were seeing. It was as if someone had erected a vast wall in Space to block their path. Then details became apparent: parallel surfaces forming the shape of an enormous cube, covered in a latticework of girders, transit-tubes, sensor antennae and radiator panels. A triumph of function over form, assembled without thought to aesthetics like an industrial plant of the 20th Century.

"What do you make of it, TuV'k?" asked Janeway. "Could that be a Jovian vessel?"

"Negative, Captain. Its appearance does not match any vessel encountered by Spacefleet."

"Motive power?"

"Unknown. I can detect no emission trail from a reaction drive."

"It's massive!" exclaimed Kim. "Radar measures its size at almost seven cubic miles. There could be thousands of people living on that thing!"

"It must be a generation ship," said Janeway, her scientific curiosity aroused. The nuclear rocket and the contraterrene drive had opened the Solar System for exploration and settlement, but travel to other stars remained the mere speculation of science-fiction writers. A journey to even the closest star was beyond the lifespan of any human crew, but in theory it was possible if the vessel was large enough to house a self-sustaining colony within its own bulkheads. Could this be Humanity's first contact with an interstellar species? How many years (centuries even!) had they been traveling? "Sparks, try hailing them."

"On which frequency, ma'am?"

The question threw Janeway for a moment. Did these extraterrans even use radio?

"Start with the Intersolar Distress Frequency," she said, "then use your discretion. Try Terran-English, Esperanto, High and Low Martian... anything you can think of. Maybe these aliens have been monitoring our broadcasts like in those old scientifilms."

The commtech never had a chance to try any of them. A shockwave rippled through the Bridge that hurled the crew against their safety webbing. A radarman who had unbuckled his restraints to pick up a dropped grease pencil was thrown clear across the deck. He got to his feet, turning the air blue with curses... then gaped in astonishment as he found himself standing halfway up the bulkhead, as if _Voyager_ had been toppled on its side.

Kim stared at his board, unable to believe what the gauges were telling him. "Captain, we appear to be caught in some kind of... gravitation beam!"

"I need a better description than that, Mr. Kim!"

"I can't explain it, ma'am... an intense gravitational field just appeared out of nowhere! It's somehow focused on _Voyager_... it's dragging us towards that cube-ship!"

 _'He's talking nonsense'_ , thought Janeway. Gravity could not be switched on and off like an electromagnet. Yet the repeaters on her lap console told the same story; every gravimeter had jumped into the red zone. "Helm, any heading; just get us out of here!"

Paris slammed forward the thrust lever and felt his couch shudder as the hydraulics absorbed the shock of acceleration. Emitting more radioactive energy in a microsecond than was expended in World Wars Two and Three, the Cochrane Drive hurled _Voyager_ against its confinement.

"We're free!" Paris exclaimed. "We're moving, we're..." His jaw dropped. "By the Twelve Moons of Jupiter!"

The cold pinpoints of distant stars had blurred into incandescent blue lines streaking across the telescreens, while the rearward-pointing electroscopes showed those same lines shifting to a crimson red before vanishing into a blackness darker than the far reaches of the void.

 _'We're moving so fast that light-waves can't catch up,'_ thought Janeway, stunned at the implications. _'That's impossible... WE'VE CROSSED THE THRESHOLD OF LIGHT SPEED!'_

Only one thought motivated her. They had to stop, before _Voyager_ got so far from Earth they could never return!

"TuV'k!" shouted Janeway. Automatic restraints had pulled her tight into the couch; she hit the release button and twisted herself around against the G-forces to face her Tactical Psionics Officer. "Find out where that gravity field is coming from and get us a firing solution!"

Beads of sweat glistened on his ebony features as TuV'k tried to shut out his extrasensory awareness of the mind-warping speed at which they travelled, to focus all his attention on the alien colossus. His dark eyes stared sightlessly at the bulkhead as his hands roamed across the ballistics integrator, adjusting dials and Vernier scales. Janeway held her breath as if even a single exhalation might distract him from his task.

"I have a solution," gasped TuV'k, "but at this speed I would not advise__"

"FIRE!"

The rocketship rang like a carillon as the torpedo tubes hurled their atom-tipped missiles into Space, the dirigible rockets blazing to life the moment they were clear of the hull. The telescreens flared with a terrible radiance and pain burst in Janeway's skull as the couch smashed into her and then there was only blackness.

**Chapter II: FREE-FALL**

Captain Janeway woke to a nightmarish sight.

She was completely naked, impaled like a butterfly on a slender needle descending from the incandescent glare of a luminous ceiling. Around her were members of her crew, equally nude and floating inside membranous sacs pierced with needles and tubules. Janeway kicked; struck out with her fists, lashing helplessly against the slick amorphous material that enveloped her. Her struggles drew the attention of a giant metal spider, its eight eyes glowing a baleful red as it scuttled across the ceiling towards the helpless woman and said: "Please state the nature of the medical emergency."

"You're the Autodoc—you tell me!" snapped Janeway. "Get me out of this stupid bag!"

" _Voyager_ is currently under null-gravity conditions," the robot replied in the grating tones of its voder-vocoder (whoever designed their Autodoc had not placed much emphasis on a bedside manner). "That pressure balloon is protecting you from infection by floating blood and other atmospheric contaminants. Furthermore there is a risk of catastrophic pressure loss. While I would remain impervious, the effects of explosive decompression on you would be most unpleasant, albeit short in duration."

"We're in free-fall?" Janeway suddenly realized the floating sensation she felt was not due to medication; it was because her body was weightless. Normally the thrust of the Cochrane Drive held the crew pressed against the deckplates but that was a pseudo-gravity, lasting only as long as they were under acceleration. "Then we're adrift in Space. Where exactly are we?"

"In the mess." _Voyager_ 's messdeck could be converted into a casualty ward if required. It had happened several times over the past couple of months, but this was the first time Janeway had been here as a patient. "Sickbay is no longer operational. A fire broke out at__"

"I mean what's our location in OUTER SPACE?!"

"I'm an Autodoc, not an astrogator!" the robot retorted.

Keeping four of its limbs attached to the ceiling with sucker-tipped hooves, the Autodoc lowered the other four down to Janeway's pressure balloon where they inserted through the air-lock valves and blossomed into an array of micromanipulators and photocell receptors. Tell-tales and tubules were removed, the vampire gauge plucked from her chest with the delicacy of a girl picking a flower. An electro-scalpel cauterized the puncture wound while simultaneously another manipulator shone a light in her eyes to study pupil dilation.

"No concussion. You'll be fine."

"Good." Janeway grabbed the manipulator and used it as leverage to tear open the thin veil of fluorocarbon plastic. The oxygen pump shut down as it registered the drop in pressure, and all of a sudden she was bathed in the ozone smell of ultraviolet radiation which could not quite mask the acrid stench of blood and burnt flesh. Janeway flinched as cold fingers seized her arm, though the robot's tactile sensors ensured the digits were exerting just enough pressure to restrain her without bruising the skin.

"Captain Janeway, just where do you think you're going?"

"To the Bridge, of course."

There was a clicking of relays as the Autodoc consulted its compassion-protection algorithm. Eventually it replied: "I cannot permit you to leave at this time."

"Unhand me, you tinpot tarantula—that's an order!"

"I should remind you that I am exempt from the Second Law of Robotics in the absence of higher medical authority."

"Then get the Chief Medical Officer!"

"Dr. Fitzgerald is no longer functioning. Resuscitation was attempted via electro-stimulus and mechanical ventilation with no success. I have filed him as deceased from shock and third degree burns at 1447 Shiptime. Corpswoman Jia Li is filed as non-operational due to inhalation of noxious fumes. Her condition appears stable but she is unresponsive to stimuli. There are three rescue teams who are operating beyond my visual range. Space Lieutenant Paris was designated to assist me as he is listed as having emergency medical training, however he left this room 13.09 minutes ago without telling me where he was going or allocating a replacement medical assistant. Most inefficient!"

Janeway stopped struggling. "Fitzgerald is dead? How many casualties are there?"

"Eleven personnel are filed as deceased, one patient is comatose, twenty-three other patients also required hospitalization, and nineteen casualties were treated and released from my care. According to a Zeroth exemption in my triage algorithm I refrained from allocating time-resources to Ensign Ahni Jetal who is filed as deceased from shock at__"

"You let her die!"

"Jetal was trapped on Deck Twelve. At the time I was required here to perform an emergency surgical procedure on Ensign Hyun Kim. I designated Kim's treatment a priority and relayed instructions by intercraft to the crewman attending Jetal, but he was unable to stabilize her."

"Hyun?" Janeway twisted in the Autodoc's grip, staring about her until she located the young ensign lying in a clamshell restraint that had been lashed to the floor.

"I should remind you that my abilities are limited," the Autodoc said in a somewhat querulous tone. "I was designed as a short-term emergency supplement to your medical team. I recommend you arrange for a replacement medical staff at the earliest convenience."

"That might take a while. Give me a list of the deceased."

A line of paper tape chattered out of a slot in the Autodoc's chassis. Janeway tore off the tape and scanned it intently. As a university graduate, she had enough fluency in machine languages to understand what she was reading.

Space Commander Cavit had died from the injuries he had received on Vesta, slipping into death unnoticed while his biomonitor was damaged. Dr. Fitzgerald had died of asphyxiation when a battle-shorted instrument panel had overheated, starting a fire in Sickbay. Space Lieutenant Star'Di had survived months of peril as a shuttleboat pilot, only to break her spine and then drown in a floating bubble of engine lubricant.

There was Timothy Lang, the Negro sergeant who had saved her life on Ceres. Commissary Officer Mbuangi, with two wives and seven children back in the Reunited States of Africa. Chief Engineer Hans Ziegler from Peenemunde in East Germany. CPO Dragan Horvat from Yugoslavia, and Air Tender Tran Lee from a tiny hamlet in South Vietnam.

There was Ensign Ahni Jetal and Computerman (F) Lyndsey Ballard and... Spaceman Second Class Frank Darwin? Just who was _he?_ A combat replacement no doubt, killed before she ever had a chance to meet him. Two months ago, _Voyager_ had a crew of 141 plus a 40-man platoon of space marines. She had shepherded them through an intersolar war losing three shipmates and fourteen marines and considered herself lucky. And now this.

"What's the current status of _Voyager_?"

"I'm a doctor, not a damage control officer. With the death of Space Commander Cavit, Tech Lieutenant TuV'k is filed as Acting Captain until you are fit for duty. I have informed the Bridge that you have regained consciousness, however I cannot certify you as fit for duty. I had to strap three ribs and conduct a tri-dimensional X-Ray of your skull. You need to remain here for recuperation and observation."

"Give me some Dexedrine and I'll be as right as rain. Now unless you have a Zeroth exemption for the _Third_ Law of Robotics, I suggest you get out of my way."

"Is that a threat?" The Autodoc spun its upper turret to bring a bell-shaped nozzle in line with the captain.

"Are _you_ threatening _me_ , you wretched robot? Sedate me and I'll have you dismantled!"

"Actually, I was going to suggest you get dressed. Unless you're planning to establish a nudist colony on _Voyager_?"

Janeway raised her hands in mock surrender. "Fine, get on with it."

She grimaced as a spray of blue foam shot from the nozzle and splattered across her naked chest. It was freezing and the Autodoc did not bother lessening the impact on sensitive areas. The foam started to set the moment it made contact with her body heat, hardening into a dermaplastic skinsuit. It occurred to Janeway that the result was hardly less titillating than if she had chosen to walk around in the buff. She resolved to change to a uniform as soon as possible.

The Autodoc used its manipulator arms to rotate Janeway in mid-air, moving the spray across her back and buttocks, then down her legs to her feet. While it worked the door swung open to admit Lieutenant TuV'k.

"TuV'k, get this mad machine off me!"

"Mr. TuV'k, kindly talk sense into my patient! The captain is not yet in a condition to resume her duties." Its task completed, the Autodoc released its grip and skittered away to check on the other patients, though it kept a wary photocell pointed in Janeway's direction.

"You must rest, Captain." Even with the legendary mental disciplines of his race, the Martian was fagged. There were dark hollows under his eyes and grime smeared his usually immaculate uniform. "The immediate danger has passed, and you have not gone off duty since our battle with the _Valjean_."

"And how long have _you_ been on duty?" asked Janeway, glancing at the two-dial chronometer on the bulkhead. One dial was synchronized to the atomic clock on the Computer Deck, the other adjusted to the standard time of the nearest space station or planetary LowPort—in this case the Vesta colony. Had it only been forty-seven hours since they had brought that traitor Chakotay to heel?

The thought started unpleasant scenarios running through her mind. "The prisoners, are they secure?"

"They are secure and uninjured. I checked on them personally. I have maintained the guard on Cargo Bay 2 even though we do not have personnel to spare." They had left most of their marines on Vesta to assist the evacuation, with only a token force on _Voyager_ to guard the prisoners until they could be handed over to the authorities on Earth.

He handed over a sheaf of damage report forms. Janeway flicked through them, picking out the matters of life-and-death for a spacer: life support, hull integrity, power maintenance, electromagnetic field integrity, radiation shielding, communications, astrogation...

"Where in Space are we, TuV'k? How far out from Sol?"

"We appear to be somewhere on the Galactic Rim. Astrogation has still not fixed our position."

 _'That can't be good,'_ thought Janeway. The stellar cartographers kept an up-to-date catalogue of every star visible from Earth. All they had to do was take spectrostellographs of whatever stars could be seen from the astrodome, then compare their spectra to those listed in the catalogue. Only three stars were needed to pinpoint their location in Outer Space. So what was taking them so long?

Tom Paris returned with a pretty yeoman, the bright-red tatters of a decompression shelter-balloon still clinging to her body. Janeway interrupted his efforts to chat up the grateful damsel so she could get some idea of where they were.

"I tried to have a word with the girls in Astrogation, but Hansen threw me out on my ear." Paris brought his head close to the captain and whispered, "Jenny told me she can't hear her sister."

The Delaney twins were an experiment in using telepathy to communicate with vessels in deep space. While Jenny Delaney worked as a chartsman on _Voyager_ , her sister Megan resided in a Spacefleet PsiDome on Mars. In theory, there was no limit to the range of telepathic communication, but no-one had ever tested that outside the Solar System.

Janeway kept her expression neutral. "Despite what the psychotechs claim, the Science of the Mind is not an exact science. Return to your duties, gentlemen. And next time you decide to play the hero, Mr. Paris, tell the Autodoc where you're going first."

"Try to get some sleep, Captain," said TuV'k before he left. "You will need all your strength in the time ahead."

Sleep did not come. Alone with her thoughts, Janeway had nothing to do but mull over the decision that had led to the deaths and injury of so many of her crew.

 _'I should have given the order to fire the second they locked on that gravitation beam. Or I should not have fired at all. They hadn't fired on us... maybe they were just curious about us. We could have negotiated, talked them into taking_ Voyager _back to Earth...'_

Janeway cut off that train of thought. "Never second-guess your decisions," her first captain had told her when she was fresh out of Spacefleet Academy, "because others will be only too willing to do so. Make your choices and move on."

She had to resist the urge to pick up the intercraft phone and give orders, demand reports, demand action. The last thing her crew needed was a captain nagging her subordinates from the comfort of a hospital ward. Instead Janeway made the rounds of the wounded: raising morale, making light of her injuries, fobbing off the questions she was unable to answer. _Where are we? Who brought us here? How do we get back home?_

She leaned over the clamshell litter that was keeping Hyun Kim immobilized. "Fight on, Mr. Kim. That's an order."

" _Umma_...," he moaned, not opening his eyes.

The young North Korean bore little resemblance to the inscrutable fanatics that Janeway's grandparents had described to her as a child: brainwashing UN prisoners and throwing their lives away in human wave attacks. Instead Kim had talked of his mother's _kimchi_ and learning the _oungum_ , of games of tag played on the endless slidewalks of Pyongyang, of mass dances beneath the rainbows that formed under the city-dome.

 _'I will get him home,'_ Janeway swore to herself. _'I will get them all home, no matter what.'_

A voice crackled from the intercraft. _"Astrogation to Captain Janeway."_

Without moving from the patient it was attending, the Autodoc shot out a telescopic arm, snatched the wireless handset from its cradle and passed it to the captain.

"Janeway here."

 _"Tech Lieutenant Hansen, ma'am. We have established_ Voyager _'s position."_

Janeway braced herself for bad news, noting the uncharacteristic quaver in the voice of the blonde ice queen who ran Astrogation with Teutonic efficiency. But nothing could prepare her for what followed.

_"Captain, we are over 70,000 light-years from Earth. We're on the other side of the galaxy!"_

**Chapter III: THE MAQUIS**

The deck was pitch-black but for the glowing arrows of radium paint that pointed the way to air-locks and decompression kits. Captain Janeway clicked on the flash-lamp strapped to her wrist and swept its beam around her. She saw shattered light-tubes, gray bulkheads lined with pipes and ducting, globules of hull-sealant left by the damage control teams, and floating blobs of water that Janeway assumed were from fire-fighting efforts until she noticed their greenish tinge. Algae that was essential on a spacecraft, to make food and convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. How much had they lost?

She had peeled off the skinsuit and was back to wearing the zip-fastened coverall that was the most practical clothing for null-gravity conditions; space-black in color, with red shoulder-boards bearing the four gold stars of a Spacefleet captain. On the left sleeve was a shoulder patch showing a winged rocket over a trio of colored circles (green for Venus, blue for Earth, red for Mars) and beneath it the words: _To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before_. It had been the motto of Spacefleet since its foundation in 1966, when the only space exploration Humanity had to boast of was the Big Wheel space station, a struggling colony on Luna and the Martian fiasco.

Janeway's tread was more cautious than bold as she picked her way down the Stygian passageway, placing her feet carefully so the magnetic-heels on her boots would keep her stuck to the deckplates, until she came upon a pair of space marines standing guard before a massive steel hatch stenciled with the words: CARGO BAY 2.

At the sight of their captain the two men brought their submachine guns to port-arms. On Janeway's order they undogged the hatch and the three of them entered, threading through a spiderweb of plastiform mesh that interlaced the cargo bay. Bound to the ringbolts that lined every surface, the mesh stopped their cargo from shifting during acceleration or null-gee. The plundered wealth of the Asteroid Belt: high-grade steel and tungsten alloy from the atomic mills of Ceres; radioactive ore pressed into lead containers, seized from the spacedocks on Pallas; sacks of gold dust from the mines of Psyche. Janeway and the marines passed this fortune without a glance, working their way to where an open space had been left over the cargo-loading hatches. Open but not unoccupied, for as they entered this area they were confronted with a cacophony of abuse.

"Traitors! Space pirates! Federation lackeys!"

"Cut us down, you b***ds! How long are you going to keep us like this?!"

"Spacefleet swine! Why don't you just air-lock the lot of us?!"

Instead of cargo, men and women were heat-sealed between the layers of mesh, suspended helplessly above the deck where all they could do was shout at their captors. Yet it was this confinement that had proved their salvation, as the force of the decelerating rocketship had been absorbed by the elastic webbing. Thirty-six Maquis fanatics, ready to wreak havoc on _Voyager_.

Opening the hatches to the vacuum of Space would be one solution. It was time to find another.

Ignoring hurled insults and spittle, the space marines clambered hand-over-hand through the bound prisoners to one particular man. Unlike the others his demeanor was serene, his eyes closed in meditation. The marines disconnected his waste and feed tubes, then cut him free with their vibroknives.

"Leave him alone!" shouted a fierce-eyed brunette with the body tattoos of an Amazon of Venus. "Where are you taking him? Chakotay! CHAKOTAY!" Taking no notice of her cries, Janeway and the marines dragged their prisoner through the hatchway and slammed it shut behind them.

The Captain's Cabin was a welcome oasis of tranquility, albeit one so small the marines had to stand outside the door. On a rocketship every square inch was rationed and even a captain's personal quarters had the bare minimum: a memex-desk for the avalanche of paperwork that plagued any modern leader, racks of book-spools on subjects ranging from astrogation to xenobiology, a telescreen in the shape of a mock porthole. A sleeping capsule, vacuum toilet and refresher were discreetly hidden behind foldaway panels, and on the deckhead a scuttle-hatch with retractable ladder provided ready access to the Bridge above.

Janeway had done what she could to make the place more homely: a Venerian climbing orchard, a null-gee coffeemaker (an antique GE Nebula she had picked up for a song on Deimos), and a videograph of a handsome man in a tan zipsuit, a puppy gamboling at his feet. Fixed to the bulkheads were framed 2-Ds of her idols: Marie Curie, discoverer of radium and the first woman to win the Nobel Prize; the aviatrix Amelia Earhart; and in pride of place above the door—the astronaut Shanna O'Donnell, the first human in Space.

In the pioneering days of space exploration, the only means of escaping Earth's gravity had been crude rockets fueled by chemical reaction. It had been crucial to save every gram of weight, and so women were used to pilot them due to their smaller stature. Studies conducted during the Second World War had also shown that women could cope better than men with extremes of temperature and long periods of isolation.

Even when larger rockets driven by atomic energy were built, married couples were preferred for emotional stability on voyages that could last years. There was Friede and Wolf Helius, who stayed behind on an airless Moon so their compatriots could return safely to Earth. The Norwegian explorers Magnus and Erin Hansen who launched the first deep space mission to Pluto, the legendary ninth planet of the Solar System. Their daughter Annika had been born on the journey, and now served as _Voyager_ 's astrogator.

After extensive computer and psychological tests, two hundred men and women had been pair-bonded for the Mars Expedition Fleet. And when others were calling for nuclear retaliation on the aborigines who massacred those ill-fated colonists, it was the Japanese linguist Hoshi Sato who averted war by performing the first Martian-Terran _melding-of-minds_ , the telepathic connection required to create true understanding between human and alien.

But the mores of society were starting to change. When the scientist Zephram Cochrane invented the electromagnetic field technology that enabled the safe use of contraterrene, the Solar System finally became open to large-scale colonization, and women were once more seen in their traditional role as child-bearers to be cosseted from danger. A recent UN committee had recommended that only men be accepted for promotion to command rank "due to their natural authority", though women should continue to be included in crews "for reasons of psychological stability".

 _'Natural authority! That's what happens when men are raised in community crèches by robots, instead of at home by their mothers,'_ Janeway thought bitterly. _'They want us to be cheerleaders instead of partners in the opening of the Final Frontier. Not on my watch!'_

Leaving the prisoner floating to inhibit any aggressive intentions, Janeway strapped herself in behind her desk, grimacing as the webbing tightened on her damaged ribs. The only thing she found annoying about space travel was the need for all these safety belts. She hadn't worn them groundside since her fifteenth birthday, when Father taught her how to fly the family car.

Unlocking the safe with her palmprint, Janeway took out an air-tight cylinder of pre-ground coffee, leaving the door open for ready access to the Colt .51 recoilless she also kept in there. She connected the cylinder to the Nebula, screwed on a drink bulb, switched on the pumps that enabled percolation in the absence of gravity and retracted the lead shielding from the radium element. As she waited for her coffee to boil, Janeway studied the man whose identity she was familiar with even before her marines had dragged him from the radioactive ruin of his rocketship.

Chakotay wore the synthileather clothing and WW3-surplus gear typical of a civilian spacer. His coppery skin and Indianesque profile would have been a familiar sight to her ancestors who settled the American West, yet Chakotay had been born in an asteroid mine a hundred thousand miles from Earth. Like many youths raised in the Spartan conditions of the Belt he had left for the inner worlds at the first opportunity, and like many Belters he found the shining lights of the megacities soon paled beneath their disease, high gravity and excessive bureaucracy.

So Chakotay had joined Spacefleet, winning fame in the pacification of Venus and the rescue of the Ares IV expedition, rising to the rank of Space Commander with an assured career path ahead. Then had come his unexpected resignation and public defection to the Maquis cause. As captain of the atomic rocketship _Valjean_ , he had wreaked havoc for over a month until Janeway had brought him down on Vesta. If she had been one of the freelance bounty hunters circling the conflict like vultures around a corpse, she'd be a rich woman now. There was a hefty price in radioactive metal on this man's head.

"Can I offer you something?" asked Janeway. "I run a dry ship for the most part, but there's coffee in that Nebula. The real thing, not synthokaf. One of the privileges of being captain."

"I'll have a cigarette if you don't mind," replied Chakotay. His voice was softer than she would have expected from a rebel. "The air-renovators on your rocketship are a lot better than those in the asteroid mines."

She could have refused, not least because cigarettes were being sold at the outrageous price of a dollar a packet; tobacco was a luxury when every acre of arable land was needed for food crops. But her mother had raised her to be a gracious host, so Janeway slid open a drawer in her memex, pulled a deck of Spaceport Classic from its spring clip and floated it across to him. "Be my guest."

Chakotay's hands were steady even though his eyes were red with fatigue. Snatching the packet out of mid-air he tapped the lid, causing a cigarette to pop out of the dispenser hole. He broke off the ignition tip and pushed the burning ember into another hole in the bottom of the packet where a tiny fan spun into life, drawing oxygen across the ember to stop it being smothered by its own smoke in the absence of gravity, while sucking the ash into an asbestos catch-pocket so it wouldn't float around the room and get in people's eyes.

"You need our help," he said.

"I beg your pardon?"

Chakotay savored the tobacco for a moment, then blew the smoke towards the nearest air-renovator. "We're a long way from Earth—a very long way. On the far side of the galaxy, I hear."

"Who told you that?" Janeway shot an angry look at the space marines. The Maquis prisoners were supposed to be kept in isolation.

"My father."

"Your father?" Chakotay's father had died when the Jovians first turned their attention on the Asteroid Belt. Spacefleet's failure to avenge his death and the 173 other colonists on Hygiea Station had prompted Chakotay's defection.

"He spoke to me in a vision," said Chakotay, realizing that elaboration was required.

Janeway knew from his dossier that Chakotay had taken up the spiritual beliefs of his Lakota ancestors. For some reason religions that had all but vanished on Earth had been taken up with fervor by those who lived offworld. It was just another eccentricity of these libertarian Belters, who believed that everyone should be guided by their personal morals instead of a centrally-imposed authority. How they justified such an attitude in an environment where a single error or act of malice could kill not only yourself but everyone else was a mystery.

"Your dead father told you that _Voyager_ was on the far side of the Milky Way?" Janeway could not hide the skepticism in her voice. Like most people born on Earth she'd been raised as a Scientologist and found it difficult to take these wacky religious cults seriously.

"No, he told me to wake up and listen. When I got everyone else to shut up and do so, we could hear your damage control teams talking. The pipes in the bulkheads conduct sound."

Janeway's look could have melted the shielding on an atomic pile. "My First Officer, Aaron Cavit—a man I served with for over three years—is dead thanks to you. So you'll excuse me if I don't appreciate your twisted sense of humor."

"Thanks to me? Or thanks to a captain reckless enough to set off an atomic torpedo while we were travelling at supra-light speed?"

"I did what was necessary to protect my ship!"

"And I did what was necessary to protect my people."

"By inciting an intersolar war with the Jovians!"

The Jovians were the name the Tri-World Federation had given to the arcane aliens who inhabited the turbulent gas clouds of Jupiter (what they called themselves was anyone's guess). Thriving in an environment hostile to any anthropoid life, they lacked only the minerals that existed in abundance in the asteroids that orbited between their planet and Mars, to which they laid claim due to their ancient victory over Phaeton—the planet whose destruction had originally formed the Asteroid Belt. Without prior warning or declaration of war, a torchship manned by a suicide pilot traveling at three-gee's of constant acceleration had struck the space station orbiting the asteroid mines of Hygiea, instantly obliterating both vessels.

It had taken the Electronic Minds only seconds to arrive at a decision. Spacefleet had neither the strength nor the ability to attack Jupiter, or defend the widely-scattered space colonies at such a distance from the inner worlds. The Asteroid Belt would have to be sacrificed in the name of appeasement.

The Tri-World Federation was able to negotiate a two-month grace period to evacuate its citizens, offering financial compensation to the Belters, even amnesty for anyone facing criminal charges on their homeworld. The Belters had not proved open to reason. Taking their name from the French insurgents who resisted the Nazi jackboot, the more militant among them had formed the Maquis.

Spacefleet had been prepared for riots, protests, sabotage; even outright war. But this was a war they had never envisioned: where the enemy wore no uniform, where atomic demolition charges were hidden in the luggage of evacuees and a thirteen-year-old girl with a beam-drill could kill a space marine. The dead language of the war-torn 20th Century was resurrected once again: _kamikaze_ , _terrorism_ , _population_ _resettlement_ , _guerrilla warfare_.

In Outer Space the firepower and discipline of Spacefleet had proven superior, but the Maquis had used the Belt to their advantage, fleeing from one hollowed-out asteroid to another, mining them with contraterrene dust and launching ambushes with magnetic-launchers and torchship engines. The conflict had dragged on with both sides becoming ever more desperate and brutal as the deadline approached.

Janeway knew that atrocities had happened out of sight of _Voyager_ 's electroscopes: habitat domes blasted open to the vacuum and rocketships packed with refugees destroyed by tired and angry space marines unwilling to risk the death-trap confines of an air-lock. Soldiers from a world that had forgotten how to fight a war, dressed in bright-red space armor designed by the psychotechs to intimidate food rioters. A world that enforced peace through the threat of orbiting A-bombs, that entrusted questions of life and death to soulless thinking machines who knew nothing of the passions that drove men and women to die for a bunch of rocks they thought of as their home.

Her coffeemaker chimed and Janeway used the distraction to get a grip on her thoughts. She replaced the lead shield, unscrewed the drink bulb and attached a one-way valve, which she put to her lips and drew on avidly. Chakotay watched the process with mild interest.

"I need some additional crew members," said Janeway. "A dozen-or-so to make up our numbers until our wounded have had a chance to recover. We don't have the resources to waste on people who aren't willing to contribute to the welfare of this vessel." She left the threat behind those words unspoken. "On the other hand, those of you who help _Voyager_ return safely to Earth will find their efforts taken under consideration in their sentence."

"That will be a great comfort when my friends are having their personality demolished by UN psychotechnicians. I want amnesty; not just for me, but for my crew. _All_ of my crew."

" _If_ amnesty is granted to the Maquis rebels it will be a matter for the Federation Council__"

"Outside the boundaries of Federation territory, the captain of a Spacefleet rocketship _is_ the Tri-World Federation, and no-one's as far outside as we are now. I want them pardoned for any actions they took during the Asteroid War__"

"Resettlement," corrected Janeway.

"__and relocated on Venus or Mars__"

"Earth, I think. That way we can keep an eye on you." Janeway consulted the microfilm files in her memex. "I'm willing to offer parole to yourself and a select few who have useful skills. This Venerian half-caste, B'Elanna Torres? I see she has advanced engineering qualifications."

"All of my people have useful skills or they wouldn't be in my crew. B'Elanna Torres is the best engineer you could have when you don't have a spacedock handy. Seska Pamyatnykh is a Computer Programmer First Class. Miguel Ayala and Kurt Bandera... good men to have at your side when your back is to the wall. Lon Suder is a crack shot, Matthew Hogan is a weapons techno, Michael Jonas is an excellent mole__"

"Mole?"

"Asteroid miner. You're going to have to find and harvest contraterrene for your Cochrane Drive, or were you planning to run this rocketship on vacuum? Just a single gram of CT coming into contact with any gram of normal matter is enough to annihilate your entire ship. It's not something you can entrust to an amateur, and it's not a job you do at gunpoint! I want equal status between my crew and yours—there's no way this will work otherwise. And while we're at it, I'd like my old rank back. It appears you could use a new First Officer."

"To Manhattan with that idea!" The thought of this traitor taking the place of the man he had killed made Janeway's blood boil.

Chakotay kept an impassive Indian face to her wrath. "I'm not going to be your Quisling while my friends are held hostage in Cargo Bay 2. Either we all work together, or not at all. There's going to have to be a certain amount of trust between us, Captain."

"YOU talk of trust... How do I know your people won't try to seize _Voyager_ the moment you're free?"

"And man it with a crew of thirty-six? It would just be the reverse of the situation you're in now, except we'd be worse off. Do you know why Belters don't need Electronic Minds to tell them what to do? Because fools don't live long enough in Outer Space to cause a problem for anyone else. There's no mollycoddling for morons, unlike on Earth." He took a final drag on his cigarette, slid the butt out of the packet and flicked it into the vacchute.

"Face it, Captain Janeway. If you're not willing to space us, then we're stuck with each other."

**Chapter IV: LOST IN THE STARS**

_"Captain's Log: January 16, 2020. Contrary to my fears, the Maquis and Spacefleet crews are working remarkably well together. Some, however, are finding it easier than others."_

"She's not just out of control, she's out of her mind!" Blood floated in tiny bubbles from the nose of Tech Lieutenant Carey. "Get this _cailín dUsachtach_ out of my Power Room!"

B'Elanna Torres backed away, swearing in Portuguese and several Venerian dialects. A burly Machinist's Mate reached out for the girl. She ducked under his grasp, grabbed the recessed handholds in the deck, flipped upside-down and slammed a magnetic heel-plate into his jaw.

The impact in null-gravity sent them both flying in opposite directions, but B'Elanna self-rotated her body so she impacted on the bulkhead feet first, locking on with her magheel boots. Then while everyone was still gaping, she walked straight up the bulkhead and dived through the tween-deck hatch.

She found herself in the Central Passageway that ran up the spine of the rocketship to ensure quick transit for damage control teams—the so-called 'jerry tube'. The collision-doors had been latched open and the passageway was choked with spacers in brightly-colored coveralls, stringing power cables and breadboarding circuits. The Autodoc was scampering across the deckhead above them, a crate of freshly-milled machine parts clutched in its multi-jointed limbs.

"This is outrageous! It is not part of my programming!" the robot protested to everyone in earshot. "I'm a doctor, not a porter!"

"Make a hole!" shouted a slip of a girl towing a plate of radiation shielding that would normally require a crane to lift. Null-gee had advantages when it came to repairs, though most regarded it as nuisance. Tools had to be tied to the user with lanyards, while dirt and oil floated about getting into eyes and circuitry. But _Voyager_ would not have gravity until they were under acceleration, and that would only happen once their captain was convinced her ship wouldn't fly apart in the process.

"Stop her!" came a shout from behind. Without turning to see who it was, B'Elanna grabbed a null-gee cable and pulled herself hand-over-hand along the jerry tube until someone seized her ankle.

"And where do you think _you're_ going, missy?" growled a space marine.

B'Elanna stifled her initial urge to sink a boot into his face. The Terran was twice her body weight and if Maquis propaganda was to be believed, these space marines were constantly on the verge of psychosis from their amphetamine pills and hypnotic indoctrination.

"What's going on here, soldier?"

"This g*d**n jungle-creeper broke the Chief's nose and knocked out Ashmore!"

Everyone had stopped working to stare at her. B'Elanna felt the arboreal claws slide out of her palms and her third lung pump extra oxygen into her blood, readying her to run or fight. Someone put a hand on her shoulder and she whirled to confront them.

"What, this little girl?" At the sight of the handsome Terran smiling at her, B'Elanna retracted her claws a fraction. "That will be all, Corporal Rico. I'll handle things from here."

"I bet you will," someone muttered.

"Sorry? I didn't catch that, crewman."

"Nothing, sir!"

"Don't you all have work to do? _Voyager_ doesn't magically repair itself, you know."

As the onlookers returned to their duties, Tom Paris cast an appreciative gaze on the cause of the trouble. The Maquis girl was slight in stature but highly feminine, her coverall tight to avoid snagging but with the front zip pulled well down to expose the body tattoos that illustrated her lifetale (he was surprised to see the crucifix of the Christian sects of Earth among them). Dark brown eyes studied him with a feral wariness, and her face had that exotic Venerian allure (but not too alien for discomfort thanks to her human blood) framed by the bob cut preferred by girls who had to wear space helmets on a regular basis. The beam-proof goggles perched on her head made her look like an aviatrix from those illegal comics he had devoured in his misspent youth, and her magheel boots were calf-hugging synthileather that went up over the knees—with matching wrist and elbow bands, Paris noted with approval. Too many spacers damaged their joints pulling over-enthusiastic maneuvers in null-gee.

"Saluton, mi nomigxas Tom Paris," he greeted her in Esperanto, the _lingua franca_ of the Three Worlds. "Kiel vi nomigxas?"

"B'Elanna Torres," she answered. "And I speak Terran-English. The Society of the Sacred Heart saw to that. What do you want, space-jockey?"

Paris had thought his days as a rockrider on the Ceres run would give him common ground with these Maquis, but they only regarded him as a Federation stooge because he hadn't defected to their cause like Chakotay had done. Some he'd rather not have as shipmates at all. Jonas he wouldn't trust as far as he could throw him on a three-gee planet. Seska seemed friendly enough, but beneath the attractive face he sensed the cunning and ruthlessness that came naturally to a Russian. And that Suder guy acted like he'd kill you just for looking at him the wrong way. Still, he was determined to make friends with some of them. At least the pretty ones.

"Chow, actually. I've just gone off watch. The wardroom is still taped off but I hear they've finally got the messdeck up and running. Care to join me?"

B'Elanna glanced back at the hatch to the Power Room, which was now dogged shut. "Looks like I've got nothing better to do."

Sickbay had been repaired so the messdeck had returned to its original function. The casualties had been moved, the stewards had cleaned and radiation-sterilized every surface, and the white walls had been repainted to the gay apple green approved by the psychotechs as most suitable for morale (though Martian spacers always complained that it should be red). The blue glow of ultraviolet lights had given way to a blue haze of cigarette smoke. Wallscreens that usually displayed nostalgic landscapes of the Three Worlds now showed propaganda extolling the conquest of Space: a Von Braun ferry rocket blasting off from Johnston Atoll, astronauts assembling the Big Wheel space station, a huge glider landing on a polar ice cap of Mars. The _Kosmokrator_ orbiting Venus was a grudging nod to Eastbloc efforts, but even as Paris watched someone changed the screen to a vidcast of last year's World Series.

He cast an eyeball over his fellow diners. The marines had formed their usual clique, playing pinochle with magnetic cards and shooting hostile looks at the Maquis who were mixing freely with the Spacefleet personnel. Two computers were playing chess on a tri-dimensional board. TuV'k sat alone, intent on an esoteric Martian puzzle. Hyun Kim had recovered from his surgery and was floating across the room above their heads, strumming a lute and singing:

_"I've been walking through the night, through the day_

_Till my eyes get weary and my head turns grey_

_And sometimes it seems maybe God's gone away_

_Forgetting the promise that we've heard him say_

_And we're lost out here in the stars_

_Little stars and big stars_

_Blowing through the night_

_And we're lost out here in the stars."_

Planting his magheels before the galley slots, Paris punched the order button. "Mess inspection, Cookie. I'll have beef fresh from the Martian ranges with corn, mashed potatoes and peas."

"Very amusing, sir." A wiry Filipino with the rating badges of a Cook First Class (Null-Gee Qualified) shimmered into view on the photophone. "The meat vats have to be recultured and Keshari says fresh vegetables won't be available for another week. I'm afraid we don't have algae either, sir. Half the tanks were shattered and Life Support confiscated whatever was left for CO2 conversion. All that's left is zymoveal."

"Yeast!" Paris grimaced. He had been raised on raw yeast mush in the Unemployment Barracks and had a visceral loathing of the stuff. "Only if it's been used to ferment glucose."

"Man does not live by bread alone."

A couple of minutes later a hatch opened and out slid a plastisteel container. A transparent lid showed the contents: a protein box still steaming from the high-frequency radiation used to cook it, a syringe of hot sauce (condiments made all the difference, Paris had learnt long ago), the usual vitamin and mineral supplements (the closest they ever got to the food pill of science-fiction), freshly-sterilized cutlery and a silver-colored squeeze-tube. Paris picked up the container and surreptitiously dropped a tenner through the hatch before it closed.

"Did he smuggle that from Earth?" whispered B'Elanna. "Maybe you should ration it."

"There's a vacuum-still hidden somewhere on board—or maybe outside on the hull—that our Master-At-Arms has yet to track down."

Once B'Elanna got her own meal they were preoccupied with the difficulties of finding an unoccupied table, strapping themselves in and then eating. The containers and cutlery were magnetic, but getting the food into one's mouth could be a difficult process. If the diner failed to concentrate, they would end up chasing their food around the messdeck with the handheld vacuum-sweeper that everyone dubbed the "phaser" because of its resemblance to a fictional raygun used in a popular space opera series. So it was only after they had finished eating that Paris tried making conversation. "What do you think of _Voyager_?"

"It's quite a ship."

"Intrepid Class," Paris said proudly. "Fifteen-deck tailsitter with variable-thrust Cochrane Drive—take you from Earth to Pluto in just over a month. She can take off and land on any planetary surface up to 1.3 times Earth gravity, has a psionic-guided weapon system, and the vacuum tubes on our Computer Deck have been replaced by transistors: they're compact, shock-resistant, and speed up our response time as we don't have to wait for the tubes to warm up."

"I already know the specs, space-jockey. Seska got them for us long before we came on board. You can thank those transistors you're still alive, or we'd have caught you with your pants down on Vesta."

"I'll drink to that."

"You read my mind."

With the aid of the moonshine Paris was able to coax out her story. B'Elanna's mother was an Amazon warrior from the Vepaja Morass, her father a lonely prospector from Brazil who had abandoned his native wife and child once it was time to return to Earth and his real family. B'Elanna had been raised in one of the convent schools that had sprung up across Venus as the Roman Catholic Church tried to proselytize new worlds to compensate for its fading influence in the old one.

On her fifteenth birthday—the symbolic Age of Ascension to adulthood for an Amazon—her mother had turned up with a war party, slaughtered the convent sisters, and dragged the children into a jungle of which they had no experience. Most never lived to be sixteen; falling prey to disease, the voracious wildlife, or the endless tribal warfare. Under the protection and tutelage of her mother, B'Elanna had managed to survive for three years until she finally had a chance to stow away on a Brazilian rocket-freighter with the help of a sympathetic crewman. "His name was Antonio," she said, a ghost of a smile lighting her face. "He's the one who got me interested in rocket engineering."

Antonio had been her first love, but B'Elanna had found out the hard way that such rocketship romances only last the length of the journey. The shining city of Brasília of which her father had often spoken proved as alien an environment as the jungles of Venus: a bland desolation of concrete buildings and open parks, devoid of the lush greenery she had known. Drifting on the fringes of society, she might have ended up an indentured worker in the uranium mines of the Andes had not the ruling technocracy of Brazil undergone one of those spasms of social conscience which inflict superpowers from time to time.

Half-castes like B'Elanna were now regarded as innocent victims of a regrettable era of colonialism. She had been enrolled in a government education program where she proved an exceptional student except for a tendency to lose her temper, which was dismissed as a legacy of her Venerian blood. A recruiter for a mining corporation sponsored a degree in spatial engineering at the University of San Paulo, and B'Elanna might have had a promising career had not the Jovians sent the entire asteroid mining industry down the vacchute.

"When you were in Brazil, did you ever go looking for your father?" asked Paris.

"I did," she replied. "I wanted him to see what I had become."

"He must have been proud that you were a spatial engineer."

"Oh, I didn't mention that. At the university, I also learned the martial art of Capoeira. It was a very short reunion."

Paris had to laugh and B'Elanna favored him with the same smile she had when talking of the long-lost Antonio. That looked promising.

"So, what's your story, space-jockey?"

Paris could have told her about _his_ father, a World War Three ace with seven kills to his name... but they were not fighter planes but entire cities destroyed with H-bombs and radiological dust. Or their hand-to-mouth existence in the Unemployment Barracks after interceptor missiles and orbital A-bomb platforms made the United States Air Force obsolete. And how if it weren't for Spacefleet's desperate need for pilots for the evacuation of the Asteroid Belt, he'd be facing a court-martial right now for that incident on Deimos.

But he didn't. Girls liked a shoulder to cry on, but had little patience for a man who poured out his own troubles—those were for bartenders. Instead Paris turned the discussion to the mysterious cube-shaped spacecraft which had brought them all the way across the galaxy. B'Elanna listened with keen interest.

"You say TuV'k couldn't detect any engine emissions?"

"That's straight," said Paris. "Sounds like a Dean Drive to me, but I thought they couldn't get that to work." According to rumor (and the occasional crackpot on the tellycasts), Spacefleet had been working in secret on a reactionless drive and had somehow managed to instantaneously transport a submarine from the depths of the ocean to the orbit of Mars, killing the entire crew in the process. Realizing they had a weapon that any country could use to hurl enemies into Outer Space or objects down on defenceless cities, the whole project had been buried deeper than a Martian catacomb.

"Crank science. No-one's been able to get past Newton's Third Law."

"No-one's been able to crack the Light Barrier either, yet here we are."

"Well there are several theories on how you could. Imagine this is _Voyager_..." B'Elanna picked up her spoon, then reconsidered, replacing it with the squeeze-tube which was more appropriate to _Voyager_ 's shape. "Imagine this table is Outer Space." She slid the tube along the table. "Even using the Cochrane Drive, it would take longer than our lifetime to get to the next star system. If that cube was travelling at the speed of light (that's 186,282 miles a _second_ ), it should still have taken us over four years just to get to Proxima Centauri. And according to a Terran theorist called Einstein, any object that weighs more than a photon can't get near that speed in the first place."

"Yeah, he said the closer you get to the speed of light, the more your mass increases." Every space-jockey who dreamed of travelling outside the Solar System knew the constraints of the Special Theory of Relativity. "So you have to expend more and more energy for less and less result. You'd need an infinite source of power, and not even contraterrene can provide that."

"But what if you could work around Doctor Einstein's theory?" B'Elanna nudged the squeeze-tube just hard enough to break its magnetic base free from the table. "Say there was another universe operating adjacent to our own, a 'subspace' with different physical laws where you're not bound by the speed of light. Scientists are still divided on the subject, but there's a theory that the Universe was created by a cataclysmic explosion (the so-called 'Big Bang') and then expanded outwards from this single point of origin. Therefore if this subspace universe was younger it could also be a lot smaller, because that universe hasn't had the time to expand as much, you see? You could cross over to that universe, use it as a shortcut, then duck back into ours."

"So how do we get into this subspace universe?"

"No idea." B'Elanna snatched the tube before it drifted too far and squeezed a bubble of alcohol from it. It floated in mid-air between them, presenting a distorted view of her face. "Here's another possibility though. Instead of travelling to another universe, you create a pocket universe around yourself; warp Space into a bubble around your rocketship. Then you distort that bubble..." She flicked a finger through it, stretching the bubble into a teardrop shape for a moment before it returned to a sphere. "...so that Space is shrunk in front of your rocketship and expanded behind it, moving you forwards. That gets around the Special Theory of Relativity because Space itself is what's moving, not the rocketship. Though it wouldn't be a rocketship at all, actually. More of a starship."

She licked up the alcohol that surface tension had stuck to her finger. Paris leaned across the table and sucked the bubble into his mouth, not breaking eye contact with her.

"Warping Space? Is that even possible?" he asked. The only warping he knew was done with a mooring line when you wanted to dock a rocketship without wasting thruster fuel.

"Sure, that's what gravity does. Especially very intense gravity, like you get when a star collapses into itself. And here's something even Einstein said was possible. Back in Terra-1935, he and this guy Nathan Rosen theorized there could be tunnels in space-time..." Paris listened politely as she spoke of 'exotic matter' and 'negative energy density' and 'non-spinning wormholes'. It was a matter of faith among space-jockeys that the technos babbled on like this to make everyone believe they understood things they had no explanation for.

Realizing she was not getting through to her audience, B'Elanna produced the obligatory slide rule that all rocket engineers carried and pulled it open. "Look, just imagine this slide is 70,000 light-years long. Earth is here—on the right index, while _Voyager_ is here—on the other end of the slide. That's a long way to travel, unless you can fold Space so that both points..." She snapped the slide rule together. "...are now adjacent in space-time."

"But can you fold Space like that?"

"Someone must have worked out how to do it, or we wouldn't be here. Up till now all these theories have been woolgathering; just a way of deluding ourselves that we won't be stuck in the same Solar System forever." B'Elanna shrugged. "It's a moot point. Whoever those aliens were, they're probably in the Andromeda Galaxy by now."

"Why not talk it over with the Glowing Gang?" Paris suggested, before remembering the altercation earlier. "Speaking of which... what happened between you and Joe Carey?"

"I've got a Master's degree in rocket science, and your _Acting_ -Chief Engineer had me stripping asbestos off the heat vents because he says it's not safe to work on the Cochrane Drive!"

"Well a rocketship's power room can be a bad place for a pretty girl. They say there was this clumsy ensign on the _Enterprise_ who got a high dose of radiation and ended up with three breasts!"

"Really?" B'Elanna looked skeptical. "The last time I heard that story, she had two heads! Did this ditzy dame have a name?"

"Dunno... Sonya, maybe?"

"That's funny, you'd think men would pay more attention to a girl with three maracas. Answer me this, space-jockey. How come everyone keeps telling me about some stupid girl whose name they never seem to remember, but I never hear the one about the dumb Terran who killed three people while hot-rodding a torchship on Deimos?"

Paris flinched.

"Can't seem to remember his name either." B'Elanna floated the squeeze-tube over to him. "Thanks for the drink, space-jockey."

"My _name_ is Tom."

"Well I'm glad you made that clear. We wouldn't want every man barred from doing their job because of _your_ goof." She unbuckled herself from the table, grabbed her food container, and pushed off in the direction of the recycler.

"Crash and burn, space-jockey!" gloated a Maquis at the adjourning table. "Don't feel bad. That dame's as prickly as a Martian cactus."

"Maybe." Paris was too experienced a Lothario to give up at the first knockback. "Half-Venerian, half-Brazilian, and raised as a Catholic schoolgirl. Could be interesting..."

**Chapter V: THE BLACK STAR**

Inside a hollow, soundproof sphere that filled almost two entire decks of _Voyager_ , Captain Janeway stood in the center of a hemispheric ring of pod-like couches. Around her, the girls from Astrogation struggled with the precarious task of loading punch cards and tape reels in a null-gee environment, while an electronicist sweated away with a soldering iron on the cabinet-sized microcomputer that synchronized the 3-V projectors, high-fidelity speakers, odorophonic nozzles, and pneumatic feedback circuits of the ship's Illusionarium theater.

To Janeway's mind the Illusionarium was more trouble than it was worth. It was expensive to maintain, took up much-needed space, and broke down at regular intervals causing the exact morale problems it was meant to solve. The present generation of spacers were a pampered lot, she mused. In her grandparents' day, a television receiver showed a poor-quality monochrome image on a tiny cathode-ray tube screen; now they had full-color tri-dimensional with Sensurround couches to provide sound, scent, and even tactile perception. If one believed the publicity hype, Hollywood Megacity was developing tri-videos that would be indistinguishable from real life, with the viewer as a character within the story itself.

Spacefleet regarded such luxuries as a necessary evil, undertaken only after several outbreaks of so-called space madness: a catchall phrase for the stresses and phobias that were inevitable when you locked people in a metal can and cast them into a deadly vacuum whose infinity was incomprehensible to the human mind. And that was when the Three Worlds were only weeks or months away. How would her crew react once it sunk in just how far they were from home?

The electronicist switched off the vacuum-sweeper whose asbestos-clad hose had been sucking up any stray particles of hot solder. "It's ready to roll, ma'am," he said, reeling in the tools attached to his belt. "I'd like to know whose bright idea it was to install an entertainment device with an incompatible power system." The notorious unreliability of the Illusionarium was not helped by the fact that it ran on the 60 hertz frequency used in North America, whereas the rest of the ship used the 50 hertz required by its state-of-the-art Eastbloc electronics.

"That's fine, Petty Officer Nesterowicz. As long as it lasts through the briefing without breaking down." Janeway pressed down on her toes to break the grip of her magheel boots and floated towards a randomly-selected couch. It splayed open at the push of a button and she slid inside, pneumatic sensors adjusting its form to the shape of her body. A keypad whirred into position under her right hand, and the speakers played an advertising jingle until Janeway switched them off in irritation. "You can let the others in now."

The light above the door changed from red to green and the curved hatch hissed open. As the girls filed out there was a quiet gasp and a loud slap. Tom Paris floated through the entrance, rubbing his cheek. "So which vid are we watching this time?" he asked, pulling himself along the null-gee cable to his favorite couch. "I vote for _The Adventures of Captain Proton._ "

"How about that new space opera series?" suggested Ensign Kim as he followed him inside. " _A Trek Through the Stars_."

"Come off it, Hyun! That show will never last."

Janeway cast an eyeball down the vid list taped to the back of her keypad. There were adventure sports ( _Pilot hypersonic planes through the storm clouds of Venus! Travel in an atomic submarine under the North Pole! Enlist as a crewman in the Transolar Rocket Race!)_ , historical documentaries about long-extinct animals _(Thrill to the man-eating lions of the African veldt! Caution: not recommended for children),_ public service vids that nobody watched unless ordered to and an 'educational' feelie ( _The shocking sybaritic rites of the Amazons of Venus!)_ that everyone watched and pretended not to, a haunted house mystery set in pre-Atomic England, and the usual space operas, quiz shows and melodramas. Janeway made a mental note to remove _Insurrection Alpha_ from the vid library—no point in giving these Maquis any ideas. Should she remove _The Green Hills of Earth_ as well? Would it be better or worse to be reminded of what they had left behind?

"Captain Janeway!" Startled, Janeway looked up to find her Chief Science Officer, Dr. Lewis Zimmerman, was hovering above her. His white coverall was gray with filth and his bald cranium sported an impromptu combover. "I must protest over members of my department being taken off their studies to carry out mundane tasks! Dr. Harren has five advanced degrees in theoretical cosmology, yet Mr. Chakotay has him working in the power relay room! My chief mathematician was reassigned to the Computer Deck just when he was on the verge of solving Fermat's Last Theorem, and my xenologist Samantha Wildman has vanished who knows where! And let's not mention what he's had me doing!" he raged, before proceeding to do just that. "I've just spent four _irretrievable_ man-hours scrubbing the conduits in Waste Recycling! It was worse than when you shanghaied me to work in that field hospital during the Resettlement!"

"Let me guess: you're a doctor, not a doctor?"

"Exactly! I joined Spacefleet to study light rays and electromagnetic fields, not stick vampire gauges in people! _Or_ scrub waste conduits!"

"And yet when you first came on board, you told me you were a man of unlimited talents."

"Talents which are being wasted! I've seen the report from Miss Hansen—there's a unique stellar phenomenon within this very solar system, yet I'm informed you have our electroscopes scouring the void for that cube-ship! You're throwing away a priceless scientific opportunity!"

"I haven't forgotten our scientific duties, Dr. Zimmerman, but my first priority is to get this ship back to Earth, not investigate every spatial anomaly we come across. Furthermore, I remind you of your contract, which states that while serving on a Spacefleet vessel you may be reassigned in an emergency to whatever duties are required by the ship's officers."

"Those duties could have been done by any rating! Do you think I can't see what is happening here? It's the same old story: pure science is a waste of time, so let's have the eggheads doing something _useful_ for a change! I shall be making a full complaint to the Office of the Scientist General the moment this vessel returns to Earth!"

"Well you'll be pleased to know those mundane tasks you performed have helped bring that moment a little closer. Now if you would just take a seat, Doctor, you'll find your concerns will be addressed during the briefing. Dismissed." When he made no effort to move Janeway added, "That's Spacefleet for 'sit down and pipe down!' Now can you make your own way to your couch, or do you want me to give you a push?"

Dr. Zimmerman clenched his teeth, then self-rotated his body until he could grab a handhold, moving hand-over-hand to a couch directly opposite. Janeway wondered if the good doctor had a point—surely Chakotay could have put their Science Department to better use in the current circumstances? When your nearest neighbor was a million miles away, a spacer had to be willing to change a diaper, patch a spacesuit or program a computer with equal proficiency, so there had always been a disdain among Belters for the overly-specialized researcher who did not appear to contribute anything useful to the community. Even in Spacefleet she had to face the prejudice of the old-time jetmen over having gained her commission as a university graduate. The whole issue was frivolous to her mind—the conquest of Space was a team effort, whether it involved married couples or Joe the Jetman and Bill the Boffin. No doubt there had been plenty of competent men who thought that Goddard or Tsiolkovsky were wasting time with their rockets and space travel fantasies.

The object of Zimmerman's ire floated through the door, gave a polite nod to the captain, and took his couch. Chakotay now wore a black Spacefleet coverall with three gold stars on the shoulder-boards. It had irked Janeway to return his previous rank, but anything less would imply a lack of confidence in her new First Officer, which could affect his authority.

And there was no denying the man knew his job. He had proven adept at improvising repairs and getting the two crews to work together, and wasn't above enforcing discipline with his fists if needed—he had already decked one man who had the effrontery to address him as "Big Chief Chakotay" instead of "sir".

He was accompanied by B'Elanna Torres, though she had not been invited to this meeting. Chakotay had wanted Torres for the position of Chief Engineer, but while the girl had impressive credentials she hardly had the seniority to command the respect of the Glowing Gang. What most of the crew thought of as _Voyager_ —its fifteen habitable decks—was only a fraction of its total size, the rest taken up by the engineering areas containing the heat radiators, the propellant tanks, the electromagnetic coils that entrapped their contraterrene and shaped the reaction jet, and the zero-length take-off rockets and ramjet engines for flying in atmosphere. The rough-hewn men who worked those deadly realms thought of themselves as the real crew, and everyone else as passengers. And just as women had a natural aptitude for nursing or astrogation, men enjoyed tinkering with machines and so the Power Room had always been a male domain. After what happened on the _Valkyrie_ , Janeway was wary about putting a female officer there unless she had what it took to assert herself. There were too many men who were eager to project the faults of one woman onto all of them, and she could not afford to undermine her own authority in the current circumstances.

The other department heads trickled in over the next few minutes. Agritech Keshari, who tended the hydroponics garden and algae tanks that made _Voyager_ self-sufficient in food and oxygen. Majel Barrett, the ship's Computer—her predecessors had made the calculations for the first rockets to launch into Space, in an era when the fair sex was thought to be too irrational for such precision thinking. Sergeant VanBuskirk, a squat muscular man of Dutch-Venerian stock who commanded their few remaining space marines. Joseph Carey as Chief Engineer. TuV'k in charge of Tactical Psionics (the department formed by the recent merging of the Gunnery, Missile and ESP divisions) with Ensign Vor'K present as his understudy.

TuV'k she had known since her student days on Mars, but Janeway feared that Vor'K lacked the requisite maturity for his job. The young ensign had been given a high esper rating by the Rhine Institute, but when dealing with the so-called Science of the Mind, it was far too easy for results to be skewed by emotions or wishful thinking.

She worried too about Ensign Kim. The position of Operations Officer would normally be held by a Space Lieutenant with several years of rocketship experience, whereas Kim was fresh out of the Academy. He had risen admirably to the task after Lieutenant Toporov was killed in a riot in Pallasport, but he was still a boy of 21—barely old enough to vote.

Last to appear was Tech Lieutenant Annika Hansen, who had just finished polishing the astrodome. The slightest flaw in the glass could lead to a navigational error of millions of miles, and she would delegate the task to no-one else. In Janeway's experience such women tended to overcompensate in their quest for perfection, but there was no-one else she would rather have plotting their course.

As always, her presence caught the attention of every man in the room. The blonde Norwegian beauty had the delicate features and statuesque carriage of those raised in a low gravity environment, and like other Spaceborn she disdained the clumsy space armor used by most astronauts, wearing only an elastic silver bodysuit that covered her curvaceous figure like a second skin. The chestplate that put pressure on her lungs so she could draw breath in a vacuum only enhanced her bust, and when wearing a bubble helmet and oxygen tanks she might at first glance be mistaken for the cover girl fantasy of a science-fiction magazine of the pre-Space era.

Close inspection however revealed differences that most men found disturbing. Her right arm ended not in a hand, but in a cluster of servo-mechanisms and micromanipulators, enabling delicate repair work that was impossible using the crude pincers of space armor. She bore surgically-implanted waldo nodes for the atomic-powered exoskeleton she required to function in Earth-like gravity. There were thermal-regulation wires woven through her skin, vampire gauges to monitor her biochemistry, and her chestplate held the switches and dials of a Haberman scanner so she could adjust that biochemistry like a mechanic would tune an aerocar. The Spaceborn regarded themselves not as astronauts but an entirely new species of Humanity, fully adapted to Outer Space via surgical modification and artificial prosthesis.

Janeway called the room to order, then listened with half an ear as the department heads gave their reports. As captain she had already received them—this meeting was to get everyone else up to speed. She paid more attention to the demeanor of those speaking, the reactions of the listeners. Who was paying attention, and who was letting their fatigue dictate a lack of it?

Hansen maintained her usual air of icy hauteur. Chakotay masked his thoughts behind the classic stoicism of the Red Indian. Paris looked bored, but that was normal for him during staff meetings—she knew he was paying attention. Kim looked a bit pale but seemed determined to soldier on despite his recent injuries. Dr. Zimmerman was scribbling away with an electrostylus, either taking notes or writing out his letter of protest. Carey kept glaring across at Torres, who had disappeared into her couch and seemed grateful to remain silent there.

 _'Lack of confidence coupled with a violent temper'_ , thought Janeway. _'Not a good combination in a potential officer.'_

She would have to make some field promotions soon, and _Voyager_ needed officers who could solve problems instead of creating them. They still needed a Commissary Officer, a Morale Officer (a bland euphemism for the Chief Psychotechnician), and there was a chronic shortage of medical personnel unless you counted that irritating Autodoc. Keshari and Paris had medical training, but could not be spared from their current positions. A Pharmacist's Mate could be utilized at a pinch, but the experience and fine motor skills of a space surgeon were not something that could be taught with hypno-educator tapes. And of the two candidates for Morale Officer, one was a psychiatrist and the other a Dianetics auditor. The brouhaha that would erupt if one was promoted over the other was not something Janeway was looking forward to.

Still, she had a good crew despite everything that had happened. The only wild card was these Maquis. They had shown a willingness to pitch in and help, but chafed at Spacefleet procedures and paperwork. Most disagreements had been minor, but those were the ones that festered when people were confined together for long periods of time. Captain Janeway intended to make that time as short as possible.

"Well, ladies and gentlemen," she said when the last speaker had finished, "as the saying goes: there's good news and bad news. The bad news is we're a long way from home. The good news is that despite being dragged across the entire galaxy, we've ended up in a inhabited solar system." A sigh of relief made its way around the circle of couches. "Lieutenant Hansen, you have the floor."

"My department has conducted a detailed astrometric survey," said the blonde astrogator in perfectly enunciated Terran-English. She tapped the buttons on her keypad and the lights dimmed. In the exact center of the Illusionarium, a stereographic projection of the Milky Way shimmered into focus. Her audience could not repress a shudder at seeing how far they were from their own solar system, isolated on the Outer Rim with their backs to the void between galaxies.

"This is our current position, over seventy light-millennia from Earth," said Hansen. "The nearest Sol-type star is fifty light-years away—even with the Cochrane Drive it would be impossible to reach within our lifetime. However, through a combination of infrared photography and stereograph interpretation, my department was able to detect an artificial structure orbiting a star a mere two hundred million miles away."

"Is that all? Let's get out and walk."

The astrogator ignored Paris's impromptu commentary. Her slim fingers danced across the keys, and the Milky Way expanded around them, stars and comets hurtling past into nothingness as they disappeared from the projection zone, until all that was left was a black void surrounded by the smoky haze of distant nebulae.

"But there's nothing there..."

"Incorrect." At the turn of a dial the stereograph began to rotate, and as it did the audience saw something strange: stars that winked out of existence only to reappear, other stars distorting into rings of light around a perfect circle of absolute blackness.

"What in the name of L. Ron Hubbard is THAT?"

"That, Mr. Paris, is a black star," said Janeway.

"Actually Captain, the correct term is 'gravitationally completely collapsed object'."

"I prefer something that's less of a mouthful, Dr. Zimmerman."

"I've never seen anything like it!" exclaimed Kim. "How can a star not give off any light?"

TuV'k leaned over the side of his couch and spoke quietly to the young ensign. "Mr. Kim, that is a comment we would prefer not to hear from a Spacefleet officer. It makes the crew nervous."

"A black star forms when a star exhausts its nuclear fuel and collapses in on itself," Dr. Zimmerman was saying, "creating a supermass whose gravitational attraction is so strong even light waves cannot escape, making it invisible to the naked eye. Until now its existence has been purely hypothetical."

"If that's the case then _you_ haven't seen anything like it either, TuV'k." Kim smirked. "Don't worry, I won't tell the crew."

"But you said there was a space station orbiting it," said Keshari. "If the gravity is as intense as you say, wouldn't it just get pulled in?"

"As long as the structure remains outside the gravitational radius of the black star, its centrifugal motion will counteract the star's pull. The structure can no more fall into the black star than our Moon can fall into the Earth." Hansen tapped a few more buttons on her couch's keypad and a hazy thermographic image hung before them: a space station that bore little resemblance to the Big Wheel orbitals they were used to.

"The structure is vast. Radar measures it as over fifteen miles along its major axis, girdled by an array of secondary structures of varying dimensions. It appears to be a cylindrical space station of the kind theorized by Hohmann and Oberth in the early 20th Century. However the lack of observed rotation—and the fact that habitats appear to have been constructed around its exterior surface, not the inside where centrifugal force could be used to create pseudo-gravity—suggest the structure is a null-gee environment. It is either manned by robots, or beings like the Spaceborn who have adapted to such conditions."

"A riddle of a space station, orbiting an enigma," mused Janeway. "So, what's it doing out here in the middle of nowhere?"

"Obviously it's a scientific research station for studying the black star," pronounced Dr. Zimmerman. "The very nature of a black star makes it difficult to observe such phenomena at interstellar distances."

"Not sure _I'd_ want to get close enough to see it," muttered Paris.

"The value to Science would be immeasurable, Mr. Paris. Gravity is the force that binds the Universe together. Its study is fundamental to understanding the nature of the Universe itself. There is nowhere that gravity is more intensely concentrated than a collapsed star."

"And you want us to walk up and knock on its door? How about we just contact this space station via radio?"

"And say what: Take me to your leader?" Zimmerman scoffed. "I doubt these aliens speak Esperanto. We've no way of translating any signals we might pick up, assuming they were even legible at this distance. We need the help of someone local, either through instruction or the Martian _melding-of-minds_."

"So we just need someone crazy enough to share his brain with TuV'k here."

"Thank you, Mr. Paris—that will do!" said Janeway in a sharp tone. Paris fell silent, retreating back into his couch under the captain's glare.

"Those aliens... or robots, maybe... do they know we're out here?" asked Kim, trying to change the subject.

"They will the moment we fire up the Cochrane Drive," said Carey.

"It is likely they know about us already," said Hansen. "Any rocketship or space station generates heat from the power and life support systems needed to keep it functioning. If we can see them on our thermoscopes, they can certainly see us."

"Then there's no point in dallying here. Miss Hansen, I want your department to plot a brachistochrone course at one Earth-gee of pseudo-gravity to that... structure, whatever it is."

"It is already plotted, Captain."

"Of course." Janeway gave a wry smile.

Chakotay spoke up. "Captain, I recommend we use a Hohmann trajectory instead. It might take longer, but we don't know how these extraterrans will react to a strange vessel blasting directly at them from out of the void. A more indirect course would conserve delta-V and give us time to finish our repairs and gather more intelligence about this region of Space."

There was a gleam in the captain's eyes that had been absent over the past few months of war and turmoil. "At Spacefleet Academy they taught us that establishing relations with an extraterran society is a slow and delicate process," said Janeway, "but over the years I've learned there are times you just have to jump in feet first. The longer we delay, the colder the trail to that cube-ship gets. Mr. Carey, start firing up the Cochrane Drive. The rest of you, return to your stations and fasten everything down. I want this ship underway in 90 minutes... _that's 90 minutes and not one more!"_ Janeway repeated to quell the inevitable protests.

"Before you go," she continued, "there's one thing I want to make clear, and I want all of you to reiterate this to everyone under your command. We are not lost in Space. We are explorers of the final frontier of Man. This is a unique opportunity to make contact with life-forms and civilizations that Spacefleet has never encountered before, and might never have encountered in a hundred generations. So we're not going to tiptoe through the dark like frightened damsels. Let us go boldly into the unknown, like the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus when he sailed for the New World__"

"It's not a research station," B'Elanna interrupted.

Janeway looked at her in some annoyance. The Venerian girl had been quiet for so long Janeway had forgotten she was present. "I beg your pardon?"

B'Elanna's face flushed but she didn't back down. "Sorry Captain, but I don't think that's a black star we're looking at. Someone's created a traversable Einstein-Rosen bridge."

Dr. Zimmerman laughed. Hansen raised a skeptical eyebrow. Everyone else just looked puzzled.

"How did we get here in the first place?" asked B'Elanna. " _Voyager_ was transported across the entire galaxy to where we are now in just a few minutes. That's not a faster-than-light drive; it's not anything that involves traversing normal Space. That black star must be the portal of an interstellar transport network."

"Young lady, I don't think you understand," said Dr. Zimmerman in a condescending tone. "Any object that falls into a black star is not coming out again. The intense gravitational force would shred it down to atoms. If even light cannot escape its gravity, then no rocketship can either."

"That's exactly the point: _gravity!_ The cube-ship that brought us here, your helmsman said it had the power to manipulate gravity, to focus it on this ship like a beam." B'Elanna spoke faster, as if trying to get her words out before someone ordered her to shut up. "Let's suppose there was an alien race... they would have to be advanced far beyond us... suppose they had the technology to fold Space, using the most powerful gravitational force in the Universe to create a passageway between two disparate points in space-time thousands of light-years apart! In tri-dimensional space the entrance of the passageway would appear as a sphere, like a black star!"

"A passageway through what?" scoffed Carey. "Subspace? Hyperspace? That's just nonsense they make up for scientifilms!"

"Maybe we should listen to what she's saying," said Paris. "Show them that thing with the slide rule..."

"You try flying _Voyager_ into that black star, Paris, it'll fold, spindle, and mutilate us!"

"Actually, the correct term is 'spaghettification'," chimed in Dr. Zimmerman.

"Then let us go boldly into the unknown like the Italian who invented carbonara."

"Oh that's right, space-jockey; make a joke out of this! I explained it to you in the messdeck! You need matter with exotic properties to stabilize the Einstein-Rosen bridge, something with negative mass... yes I _know_ that violates known laws of physics but it's been theorized__"

 _"That's enough!"_ Captain Janeway didn't know whether to feel anger or pity for the girl, but she was going to have Chakotay's hide for a skinsuit for bringing her to this briefing. "I'm not going to waste our time on wild speculation. We can find out what that space station is when we get there, and the sooner the better." She glared around the room. "Well, why are you all still here? To your stations!"

_"NOW HEAR THIS! ALL HANDS SECURE FOR ACCELERATION! SET MATERIAL CONDITION YOKE THROUGHOUT THE SHIP!"_

Throughout _Voyager_ hatches were dogged and collision-doors sealed. Null-gee cables were stowed and safety rails erected around hatchways that would become hazards in the presence of gravity. Petty officers roused sleeping spacers who grudgingly stretched safety webbing over bodies that had been adrift in the blissful comfort of null-gee. Everyone regardless of rank or rating looked about them for loose objects, no matter how small, that could become lethal missiles.

One by one, the calls came through to the Bridge: "Astrodome secure... Radar Room secure... Forward Torpedo Room... Aft Torpedo Room... Magazines One and Two... Dorsal Battery... Ventral Battery... Central Passageway... Sickbay... Computer Deck... Hangar Deck... Messdeck... Galley... CPO Mess... Wardroom... Main Radio Room... Emergency Radio Room... Auxiliary Control-Room... Science Laboratory... Life Support... Waste Recycling... Air Garden... Illusionarium... Gymnasium... Cargo Bays One to Three... Berthing Compartments One to Seven..."

"What's the hold-up in Engineering?" asked Captain Janeway. She was strapped down in her acceleration couch, scowling at the tell-tale lights on her lap console, one of which was still red.

"Burial," said Chakotay, sotto voce.

Janeway bit her lip. She had almost forgotten—the funeral rites of the twelve dead spacers (Jia Li had never woken from her coma) had been held over a week ago. A generation raised in the shadow of nuclear holocaust had learned to detach the disposal of the dead from the rituals of mourning, more so when a decomposing or radioactive corpse could contaminate the closed environment of a rocketship.

But spacers had their own rites; bodies were not set adrift in the void or launched into the Sun (which could be billions of miles away) but wrapped in dermaplastic and fastened outside the hull until they could be recycled as reaction mass for the ship's engines—or in the case of a torchship, placed where they would be cremated by the exhaust plume. What had been cold-blooded pragmatism in the early days of Space exploration was now a hallowed ritual.

 _'Those we loved are gone, these bodies are but empty shells,'_ thought Janeway. _'We consign them to the fire to be scattered across the stars. Ashes to ashes, stardust to stardust...'_

In the control-room crammed up against the massive radiation shield that separated the habitable compartments of _Voyager_ from its Cochrane Drive, men in sweat-soaked coveralls hunched over shining instrument boards, their gaze fixed on flow gauges, pyrometers, magnetometers, rad-counters and gamma-ray detectors; the TV eyes and electronic sensors that monitored areas too dangerous to station personnel, where only robots or remotely-operated waldos could carry out adjustments or repairs. A telescreen view of the reaction chamber cast the unearthly blue radiance that gave the Glowing Gang its name: a lethal genie trapped within the invisible confines of its electromagnetic bottle, dancing and swirling like a fiery elemental, the monstrous energy released by the collision of matter and anti-matter.

At the Chief Engineer's station, Joseph Carey clutched the red-lit lever that if pulled would jettison the Cochrane Drive and its contraterrene fuel-trap with explosive bolts and booster rockets. No-one knew if that would actually work in practice. Such methods might have served for atomic engines, but a contraterrene-powered torchship was an entirely different matter. Everyone in the Glowing Gang suspected that if those electromagnetic fields faltered for so much as a microsecond, they'd all be obliterated before anyone could even think about pulling a lever.

 _'And the Space Commander wants to put that crazy Venerian in here,'_ thought Carey. The last thing he wanted was the lads distracted by women. Such power was not to be taken lightly. As a child, he had watched the sky glow from across the Irish Sea as England burned, and the energy confined in the Cochrane Drive made a fusion bomb look like a firecracker.

A light flashed red above a lead-lined hatch stenciled with the warnings: HIGH RADIATION AREA and NO MAGNETIC BOOTS BEYOND THIS POINT. Carey heard the chug-chug of pumps as high-pressure hoses went into action. The light turned green and the hatch hissed open. Three figures stepped out of the decontamination chamber; slick with detergent, grotesque in their lead-and-cadmium armor, their suction-boots squelching on the deckplates.

"We lost Ballard," said one of them. His voice was overly-loud and metallic, projected through the speaker grill from the man encased inside. "Her tether must have come loose."

It took Carey a moment to remember who he was referring to. Lyndsay Ballard, the dead computer tender. Now her corpse would drift forever, incorruptible in the vacuum of Space. "Keep it to yourselves," he ordered, without taking his eyes off his board. "If anyone asks, she burnt up with the others. Are we all clear on that?" There was a general murmur of affirmation. His lads were a tight-knit group; he knew none of them would speak out of turn. Carey waited until the three men had been helped out of their rad-suits and strapped into acceleration couches, then keyed the intercraft.

_"Power Room to Bridge. Ready to engage thrust. Throttle control transferred to helm."_

"My course is set for an uncharted sea," quoted Captain Janeway. "Mr. Paris, you have the conn."

With an intense expression that bellied his usual demeanor, Tom Paris unclutched the flywheel and in obedience to Newton's Third Law of Motion—for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction—the thousand-foot rocketship began to turn in the direction opposite to the flywheel's spin. When the correct position was reached he locked the gyros, waited for Astrogation to verify their heading, then flipped the switch to turn control over to the robot-pilot. As the preprogrammed tape began to spin in its reel, Paris keyed the PA toggle on his intercraft. "Now hear this! All hands, brace for acceleration! Engaging thrust in ten seconds... Nine... Eight... Seven... Six..."

There was nothing to do but wait as the numbers counted down. The Cochrane Drive would fire automatically on the exact millisecond and for the exact amount of time that had been calculated by Astrogation. Paris would only take over if something went wrong, which now that he thought of it was highly likely. His palms felt damp on the levers and his stomach was doing skew-flips. Had their mismatched crew of Spacefleet and Maquis misfits goofed somewhere? A stuck solenoid, a misaligned component, an unsecured latch? Were they about to go up in the biggest blast since Manhattan Island?

"...Five... Four... Three... Two..."

Paris was drawing breath to shout "One!" when he was slammed back into the acceleration couch. Something small and metallic smacked into his cheek hard enough to draw blood, clanked off the deckplates and instead of floating free, rolled along what was now the floor until it dropped into a crawl space from where it was later retrieved after a good deal of effort and cursing by the shamefaced crewman who had failed to tighten the nut properly in the first place.

**Chapter VI: AMAZONS**

_Hail Mary, full of grace,_

_The Lord is with thee,_

_on Venus and among the stars..._

B'Elanna Torres had been confined to quarters. Her quarters were a six-foot long capsule that a Jap wouldn't sleep in, yet she was expected to rest and even entertain herself there. Not that the capsule was short of amenities. Ultraviolet lamps and a hypno-sleep light were fixed into the ceiling, the mattress had a built-in automassager, and there were book-spools and music-tapes slotted into the sponge-rubber padding that lined every surface. The psychotechs were supposed to screen out anyone who suffered from claustrophobia or pathological solipsism, but B'Elanna couldn't help wondering how many cases of space madness were caused by the inability to get out and run around whenever you wanted. Perhaps these Terrans didn't see the need, raised as they were in air-conditioned megacities that always felt too cold to her, using photophones to talk and slidewalks to walk and illusionariums to experience lives they were too lazy to live themselves.

_Blessed art thou among women,_

_And blessed are the fruit of thy womb, Jesus of Terra..._

The music included Noisy Rhysling, the post-atomic melancholies of Starr Anthim, Venus Exotica that didn't sound like anything she had heard on her homeworld, and a tape labelled _Songs of Space_ which for some strange reason included _Also sprach Zarathustra_ (what did Nietzsche's ramblings have to do with Outer Space?). From the girly pin-ups and book-spools of trashy adventure tales set on 'frontier Mars' and the 'exotic jungles of Venus', she concluded the last occupant of this capsule had been a male Terran, most likely a space marine. As she was now using his quarters, he had either been left behind on Vesta to force Belters onto the evacuation rockets at gunpoint, or his expectations of adventure had come to a sudden and unwanted end.

_Holy Mary, mother of God_

_Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death..._

Someone knocked on the outside of the capsule. B'Elanna quickly hid the rosary under her mattress, shoved a bookphone in her ear and adopted a bored expression.

"Who is it?"

"Chakotay. I need a word."

The privacy screen slid open to reveal Chakotay standing on the short ladder that allowed access to the capsules, racked three high on either side of a narrow aisle. He wore Spacefleet dinner dress, the custom-fitted jacket and trousers fresh out of the ship's mecho-tailor. The technology that enabled an electro-mechanical milling machine to produce a custom-made replacement part from a block of steel could also be used to make clothing, using a pre-programmed pattern adjusted to the wearer's measurements. Most of the Maquis had been happy to exchange their filthy and irradiated synthileathers for a brand-new coverall, though some had made a point of removing the Spacefleet shoulder patch. Chakotay had kept his patch, B'Elanna noticed, but his jacket was bare of medals and on his feet were a pair of moccasins that made an incongruous contrast to his formal attire.

"Did you hear the story about the ensign with three breasts?" asked B'Elanna.

"All I keep hearing about is the Venerian with no brain."

B'Elanna sat up shouting, "Lieutenant Carey is an _OWWW!_ " as she banged her head on the capsule's ceiling, trailing off in a string of curses. Chakotay informed her that Carey had never been groundside on Venus, so was unlikely to have had intimate relations with a mudsucker eel.

"I thought I'd earned your loyalty, B'Elanna. Pulling stunts like this make the Maquis look bad—me especially, because I keep having to defend your actions."

"I didn't notice you defending me at the senior officer's briefing."

"I know when to speak up and when to shut up. If you had a theory about that black star, you could have told me afterwards instead of trying to show up Zimmerman and brass off the captain."

"I'm sorry, did I interrupt her speech? I heard all that _let-us-boldly-go-where-no-man-has-gone-before_ from so-called explorers in the Vepaja Morass. There were little girls like me there already, but no-one ever named schools on Terra after us."

"I don't want to hear it!" barked Chakotay. "Right when I've finally gotten everyone working together, you assault two people and get these Spacefleet people riled up at us! Now I've got a captain who wants you court-martialed, when I'm trying to convince her to make you Chief Engineer!"

"I've already been hauled over the atomic pile by the captain. She gave me another speech and told me to get my engrams cleared. The Dianetics auditor saw my tattoos and started lecturing me about how Catholicism was a conspiracy by aliens to control the Human Race, so I told him he peddled a quack psychology cooked up as a money-making scheme by a megalomaniac pulp novelist." B'Elanna fell back onto her mattress. "At least no-one's using your religion as a therapy tool, Chakotay."

"So, were you planning to spend the entire trip in this pod?" Chakotay asked. B'Elanna didn't answer. "If you want to be any kind of engineer on this rocketship, you're going to need the support of the Glowing Gang. You might want to put some effort into bonding with them instead of handsome space-jockeys." He ducked as B'Elanna threw her bookphone at his head.

"I am not going to _bond_ with any of these idiots! If I have one more Terran male ask me about the mating rites of the Amazons, I'm going to break his jaw!"

"Then change the subject. Talk about soccer, how boring the weather is now it's controlled by Science, the practical applications of folding space."

B'Elanna just stared at him.

"Spacewarp drive," said Chakotay. "Can you make it work?"

"You... you can't seriously believe I can invent and build a supra-light drive in _Voyager_ 's machine shop! This is real life, not _Captain Proton!_ "

"We're fifty light-years from the nearest Sol-type star," said Chakotay. "So how did that space station get here? When that star collapsed the shockwave would have destroyed any planet in its habitable zone. No civilization would send out a generation ship to travel for centuries to a solar system they can't colonize. Either your theory is correct and that's an interstellar portal, or these aliens can travel faster than the speed of light. If we could get hold of a drive unit, you could reverse-engineer it."

"And just what are we going to buy it with: mirrors and glass beads?" B'Elanna ripped a pin-up from the ceiling of her capsule: a _National Geographic_ 2-D of a female Venerian bedecked in jewels, a sword harness, and not much else. "Beautiful, isn't she? The famous Amazon warriors of Venus. Do you know what diamonds are, Chakotay?"

"Sure. They're used as an abrasive in asteroid mining tools."

"On Venus they're jewels: _starfires_ , we call them. Terran traders would buy whole acres of jungle with those shiny chunks of crystalized carbon, clear the ground with slave labor and grow food crops under sundomes to ship back to Earth. My mother boasted of her hoard of diamonds. She must have slaughtered and enslaved half the tribes of the Vepaja Morass to get them. She thought she could use them to buy modern firearms and the traders were happy to string her along. I tried to tell her they're worthless because you Terrans can make diamonds in a laboratory; you don't have to dig them out of the ground anymore. She didn't listen; she just ended up doing their dirty work. That's what happens when a primitive culture meets an advanced technological society."

Chakotay could have told her something different. The Amazons he'd fought had been covered in blood, not diamonds, screaming like banshees as they swarmed through the Edenglass, hacking down settlers with their double-bladed scimitars. They had spent months searching for the culprits with 'copters and amphibious-tanks and orbital platforms; all the technology of Terra useless against an enemy that hid in the swamps and jungles. Eventually Spacefleet had defoliated everything in a twenty-mile radius around the New Earth colony, and that had worked well enough until the never-ending rains turned the ground into a quagmire infested with bloodworms and mudsucker eels.

Memories came flooding back... _heaving gold ingots over the side as their swamp-tank sank into the mud... the siren song of the Shambleau calling him into the darkness... slaves screaming under the electrolash of a Nigerian overseer... two armies pausing in battle to watch his duel with Ke'Shaan at the Cytherean Gate... Von Stauffen lying back against the A-bomb as it ticked down to oblivion, saying in his clipped Prussian manner, "Meine Herren, I think it is time you left." The cultural engineers preaching their grandiose schemes while mutant children begged for scraps in the LowPort... Ke'Shaan tearing herself from his arms to stride to the gibbet with her head held high. "Venus is not a goddess of love, Ch'Kotay. On this world, one embrace's death."_ He wrenched himself back to the present with an effort.

"Those aliens aren't going to hand over their technology to a bunch of savages who can't even make it out of their own solar system," B'Elanna was saying.

"I wasn't suggesting we ask politely."

She gave Chakotay a skeptical look. "You think Miss Bold Explorer is going to engage in space piracy?"

"I think this captain will do whatever needs to be done to get her crew home," said Chakotay. "What do you know of the _Valkyrie_ disaster?"

"Just the Hollywood tri-vid. Meteorite kills everyone in the male berthing compartment, captain goes nuts, the girls take over and wacky hijinks ensue."

"I doubt Captain Janeway remembers it that way." The disaster had involved murder, mutiny, radiation sickness and a lottery of death right out of the horror tales. "She was on the crew that brought the _Valkyrie_ back to Equatorial Station. They were lucky to escape court-martial."

The verdict of the board of inquiry was that no mutiny had occurred: the senior officers had succumbed to space madness and the crew had confined them for their own safety. Two officers had died trying to retake the ship and one had committed suicide, so Captain Qu had been the sole remaining witness against the accused. Months of solitary confinement in an air-lock had left their toll, and Qu's belief that he was an omnipotent being who could change the Universe with a snap of his fingers had not left a good impression.

"I'm going to have dinner with the captain now," said Chakotay. "I think she wants to mend some bridges. So if she agrees to let you out of this capsule, I want your word that you'll fix things up with Carey."

"Dinner with Janeway, huh? You always had a thing for redheads."

"I'm waiting for an answer, Torres..."

"YES!" shouted B'Elanna. As Chakotay continued to stare at her she mumbled, "I mean, yes sir..."

"I'll hold you to that."

Chakotay shut the privacy screen and dropped his moccasin-clad feet onto the deck. It wasn't an Amerindian thing; moccasins were more comfortable than magheel boots now that _Voyager_ had returned to pseudo-gravity. The ship was only accelerating at one-gee so that repairs could continue, but it still felt like he had lead weights on his feet after all that time in free-fall. And moccasins had the added advantage of making less noise on the deckplates. Spacers valued their sleep.

His feet might have been too quiet. As Chakotay made his way through the berthing compartment, a stall slid open and out stepped a stark-naked girl, her pale skin and auburn hair gleaming from the refresher.

"Comrade Chakotay," she greeted him, as casually as if she had been fully dressed. "I've been looking for you."

"Hello Seska," replied Chakotay, feeling an inexplicable embarrassment. There was little room for privacy on a spaceship, and berths were no longer segregated by gender after what happened to the _Valkyrie_ , but they had been lovers when he first joined the Maquis, until he became her captain and had to break off the relationship. The need for genetic diversity in the tiny Belt colonies had caused spacer women to adopt the pragmatic morals of the ancient seafaring Polynesians, and he could not help wondering who was sharing her affections now.

"Look what I found." Seska stepped past Chakotay, her nude body tantalizingly close in the narrow space, and used her palmprint to key open a locker. From it, she removed a small bundle of Martian leather, bound with a cord. "I believe this belongs to you."

Chakotay took it reverently from her hands. "I thought I'd lost it back on Vesta! Where did you find it?"

"Janeway's marines stripped the _Valjean_ of anything that might be of intelligence value. I was able to convince my kinesic-interrogator that the items were purely personal. After we were set free, I was able track it down in Waste Recycling before it got burnt up as reaction mass."

"Thank you," was all Chakotay could say. That a Communist who had renounced all religion had been willing to spend hours sorting through the trash to find his sacred bundle meant a lot to him. He pressed his fingers against the leather pouch, verifying the contents by touch. The items inside were private, not to be shown even to this woman with whom he'd shed blood and shared oxygen. A fish carved from asteroid rock by a boy who had never seen an ocean. A love knot from the girl who had made him a man—so he would remember her name, she said, but he had forgotten it anyway. The eagle feather he had stolen as a feckless youth from a well-guarded aviary on Earth. The bloodstained cloth Ke'Shaan had used to bind the wound she had given him. A half-melted stembolt from Hygiea Station.

Love, death, pain, regret, counting coup. Medicine for a vision quest.

He would have to find a place to meditate, Chakotay thought; somewhere with a view of the stars. The astrodome would be ideal, but Hansen guarded it against all intruders regardless of rank, ostensibly to prevent damage to the delicate instruments and photographic plates (he suspected the real reason was to stop amorous spacemen from distracting the legendary beauties of Astrogation). Perhaps he could find a suitable porthole, but there were precious few of those on a rocketship for the simple reason that there was seldom anything for a crew to look at until they reached their destination.

Seska was taking her time getting dressed, displaying her svelte curves for his appreciation as she slipped into shorts and a shirt and pulled on her calf-boots. Hailing from the polar city of New Leningrad, Seska was the end product of an economic system that conscripted its best minds into science and industry while the West saw their talent wasted in advertising and entertainment. Despite the early lead the United States had in the Space Race, by the 1980's the Sino-Soviet Union was racing ahead in the fields of electronics, computer technology, and the safe production of atomic energy. Seska's specialty was cybernetics, the interaction between humans and machines. A report she submitted on the Electronic Minds had resulted in her exile to the Asteroid Belt. "The Presidium didn't like the suggestion that they were no longer running things," she had told Chakotay.

Whether this tale was the truth was another matter. Seska had proven adept at gathering intelligence about Spacefleet activities during the Asteroid War: tapping computers and photophone lines, interrogating prisoners and (Chakotay suspected) drawing on a network of spies and fellow travelers working for the Soviet KGB. No-one queried her success. Too many Belters had their own murky pasts and dubious associations. Chakotay had even wondered if B'Elanna wasn't secretly working for the Brazilian government.

For all the talk of the Jovian menace, everyone knew that the greatest threat to peace in the Solar System was Earth itself. The orbiting A-bomb platforms of Spacefleet had made wars of conquest obsolete, but not the pressures that caused them. Cold War hostilities threatened to erupt anew on other worlds, while young superpowers like India and Brazil were flexing their might. Africans and Asians who had been freed from the yoke of colonialism were establishing colonies on Venus and Mars, seeking to depose civilizations they viewed as primitive or decadent. Famine loomed on Earth with over seven billion people crammed into megacities and not enough arable land to feed them. Scientists had invented the birth control pill but it had little effect on the morals of society. It was more politically expedient to support off-world emigration than unpopular measures of population control.

All of these interests were threatened by the Tri-World Federation: an organization where Earth, Venus and Mars held equal political status, backed by the military power of Spacefleet. There were plenty of countries who had been eager to help the Maquis give the Federation a bloody nose. But despite all the speeches in the UN Council, the support had been lacking when it most counted. The Belters had been willing to put their lives on the line, but with the horrors of World War 3 still in the memory of most Earth citizens, the politicians had preferred to keep the conflict hundreds of thousands of miles away.

"What's going to happen to B'Elanna?" Seska asked.

"I don't know yet," said Chakotay, "but let me handle it."

"I've been talking to the _Voyager_ crew." Seska stepped close to him and lowered her voice. "None of them are happy about this fix their captain has gotten them into. There are a number of comrades here from progressive countries. With the right encouragement and the support of the Maquis, they would be ready to back you."

 _'Conspiracy is as natural as breathing to these Reds'_ , thought Chakotay. "Back me in what, exactly?"

"Should you want to take control of _Voyager_. People feel better when there's a man in charge."

"I'll remember that next time you tell me what I should do."

"You're a soldier!" snapped the Red redhead, her nostrils flaring. "I've seen Janeway's record. She's a scientist. She never came up the ranks the hard way like you did."

 _'And that's why I underestimated her,'_ thought Chakotay. He had hoped to take _Voyager_ by surprise while her crew was assisting the evacuation of the Vesta colonies. Instead, Janeway had attacked with a boldness that surprised him, right up to the moment an atom-tipped torpedo ruptured the hull of the _Valjean_. The thought of all those who had died because of his mistake made Chakotay's response harsher than he intended. "If I ever hear you talk that way again, I'll personally throw you in the brig for mutiny!"

Seska's eyes went wide. "You'd put me in the brig... after all we've been through?" Chakotay didn't answer. "That uniform has got you thinking you're one of _them_ again. Just remember—when your cause needed help after Spacefleet betrayed you, my people were the ones who came to your aid."

"I remember," said Chakotay, "that when it came down to a veto in the United Nations, the Sino-Soviet Union chose to abstain."

"That was the Presidium's decision, not mine!" She placed a hand lightly on his chest. "I stayed with you till the bitter end, didn't I?"

 _'And why did you stay?'_ Chakotay wondered. _'Was if for me, or some enigmatic plan by your superiors in New Moscow? Do you even know yourself?'_

"Then stay with me now," he said in a softer tone. "I'm trying to get this crew to work together. Don't undermine what I'm doing."

"Fine, just remember whose side you're on."

"There are no 'sides'. No Maquis and Spacefleet, no Eastbloc or Western Alliance. It's just us; stuck on this rocketship on the edge of nowhere. Splitting this crew into rival factions is going to get us all killed, and I, for one, would like to get home."

"And then what?" Seska shot back at him. "Do you seriously believe that so-called pardon of Janeway's is going to keep us out of a re-education clinic? When this rocketship returns to our Solar System, YOU need to be in command!" Without waiting for a response, the Russian girl spun on her heel and strode off down the aisle, her back straight with anger despite the womanly sway of her hips.

Chakotay watched her go, his face pensive.

TO BE CONTINUED


	2. Second of Three Parts

Synopsis: The United Nations Rocketship VOYAGER under the command of CAPTAIN JANEWAY was returning to Earth when it was caught in the gravitation beam of a vast cube-shaped spacecraft that carried them off to the other side of the galaxy! Whilst VOYAGER was able to break free, their losses forced CAPTAIN JANEWAY to form an alliance with renegade Spacefleet officer CHAKOTAY and his crew of Maquis rebels. Seeking a clue to the whereabouts of the cube-ship, VOYAGER has set course for a mysterious alien space station orbiting a black star.

**Chapter VII: A MEETING OF MINDS**

_"Captain's Log: February 13, 2020. Our journey home is several weeks old now, and I have begun to notice, in my crew and in myself, a subtle change as the reality of our situation settles in. Here on the other side of the galaxy we are virtually the entire family of Man. As such we are more than a crew, and I must be more than a captain to these people. More than ever now, they need me to be larger than life. I only wish I felt larger than life."_

Janeway swung the speaker cup away from her mouth and switched off the sonotyper. In the videograph on her memex-desk, Mark Johnson smiled his bashful smile while playing with the Irish setter puppy they had rescued from a termination clinic at Manhattan Memorial Crater. Mollie had died of cancer despite their efforts and their relationship had not lasted much longer. They had signed a six-month marriage contract, but she had balked at making their marriage permanent as she would have had to resign her commission.

Mark had never understood, and how could she ever explain to someone who was not a spacer? What it was like to feel the terrible power of a rocketship unleashed, to slip free the binds of gravity, to experience the humbling infinity that transformed one's soul into a saint or a madman. There were times she wished the videograph was only a still-life image. Mark and Mollie's never-ending frolic seemed a lost opportunity trapped in a loop of time. The Bureau of Eugenics would never give her permission to bear children now, given the risk of exposure to cosmic radiation in her career.

_'I only wish I felt larger than life...'_

Janeway frowned, having second thoughts about leaving that last sentence in her Log. She threaded the recorder spool through the editing block and was trying to splice and tape the offending section when the Chief Steward buzzed her on the intercraft.

_"You asked me to remind you of your upcoming dinner appointment, ma'am."_

Janeway uttered a Martian word they had not taught her at the Scholarium. She wasn't even dressed yet. "Thank you, Daniels. Just give Space Commander Chakotay a drink when he arrives and tell him I'll be joining him... eventually."

Janeway made a half-hearted effort to rewind the spool before giving up and shoving the whole lot into a drawer to be taken care of later. She slid off her boots and stuck them to the bulkhead by their magheels, then stripped off her clothes and dumped them into the laundry chute.

Stepping into the refresher she was enveloped in a warm fog and a spray of scented soap to lather her up, followed by jets of water to rinse her off and blasts of hot air to dry her, sonic vibrations to massage her body and ultraviolet radiation to kill harmful bacteria. A hood crammed with brushes, spray-nozzles and micromanipulators lowered over her head, whirred and hummed for several minutes, then raised to reveal that cosmetics had been applied and her hair had been shampooed, combed and styled into soft auburn curls that brushed against her shoulders. With the advent of pseudo-gravity, it was time to let her hair down from the updo her crew had dubbed 'The Bun of Steel'.

Janeway stepped out of the refresher to find her uniform had emerged from the laundry chute freshly cleaned and pressed, but she decided instead on a more casual look: a loose-fitting white blouse, wide-legged slacks, a dark blazer cliched at the waist by a magclip belt, and a pair of jade earrings she had picked up on a weekend rocket trip to New Zealand in her Academy days. Thick-soled oxfords completed the ensemble—Spacefleet had abolished height restrictions with the advent of the larger CT rocketships, and too often now she found herself craning her neck to look a shipmate in the eye. She checked the result in a mirrored wall panel, took some painkillers for her ribs which were aching again with the restoration of gravity, and made her way to the jerry tube.

The jerry tube was the reason female spacers did not wear skirts even under pseudo-gravity. _Voyager_ was now a thousand-foot skyscraper shooting through space with 'down' in the direction of their Cochrane Drive, so the Central Passageway had become a vertical shaft fifteen decks high. Spacers climbed ladders recessed into what had once been deckplates and bulkheads; those going up moving to the right of each hatchway, those going down to the left. In the center of the shaft the technos had jerry-rigged a continuous belt-lift to carry supplies between the various decks. Heedless of the drop below, Janeway leapt across to a platform carrying half a dozen cylinders of chlorofluorocarbon refrigerant and rode it down, stepping off as she came level with the hatchway to the officer's wardroom.

The wardroom was more than a mess for the ship's officers; it was a place for greeting dignitaries, holding briefings or holding court if needed. As such it was the public facade of _Voyager_ and appointed accordingly. Sound-absorbing panels hid pipelines and electro-mechanical circuits, the deckplates were covered by a carpet heated by radioactive isotopes and a luminous ceiling bathed everything in a lambert glow. Self-adjusting chairs upholstered in red Martian leather (the null-gee straps tucked away in discreet compartments) surrounded an elliptical table made of genuine tree-grown wood from Venus. Dominating the room was a framed 2-D painting: a Chesley Bonestell pastiche of _Voyager_ flying over the rings of Saturn, its silver hull reflected by the ice crystals beneath.

Janeway had selected the other decorations, most of them over the strenuous objections of Spacefleet psychotechs. A solar microscope from 18th Century France. A bronze bust of the Homeric hero Odysseus. A dragon carved from white jade, smuggled out of Red China before the End of History. Antique books printed on paper: _Divina Commedia_ by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, _The Wonderful Wizard of Oz_ by L. Frank Baum (one of the few copies to survive the pyres of the House Committee for the Protection of Youth), Ayn Rand's _The Fountainhead_ , and _Twenty Jataka Tales_ by Nora Inayat-Khan. Sealed behind leaded glass stamped with warning trefoils was an antique parchment she had salvaged from the ashes of Milan: a flying machine sketched by Leonardo di Vinci, four hundred years before the Wright brothers took to the air.

Her First Officer was nursing a drink bulb and pondering the latest addition to her collection; a shipbuilder's plate that had been mounted after their recent battle over Vesta.

_N.R.S. Valjean_

_No. 233 constructed by_

_Deutsche Raketen AG_

_Utopia Planitia, Mars_

_1995_

"Perhaps you should take this down," said Chakotay, "given the current circumstances."

"Certainly not," replied Janeway, pretending not to notice his non-regulation footwear. "I'm quite proud of that trophy. The captain of that rocketship gave us a good deal of trouble, as I recall."

Chakotay had to smile. "I'm surprised at the books you have here. _The Wizard of Oz_ is still illegal in certain city-domes of North America. And isn't the _Jataka Tales_ a Buddhist text? Not the usual thing to find in a Spacefleet wardroom."

"Well that book was written by a very brave girl. During the Second World War she parachuted into Nazi-occupied France to aid the Resistance, only to be betrayed and die in a concentration camp."

"A Maquis supporter? A woman after my own heart."

Janeway carefully removed _Divina Commedia_ from its temperature-controlled cabinet. The book was already damaged, with pages missing and _Inferno_ appropriately charred. "So much of our culture has been lost. The history purges of the Communists, the moral crusades of the Rationalists, three world wars. Even the post-war reconstruction only led to a flood of escapist entertainment. People just wanted to forget what had happened—let the past burn and good riddance, they said. There are children these days who can't even read Esperanto, let alone these ancient European languages. They've been raised on book-spools and tri-vids."

"Consider your origin," Chakotay quoted. "You were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge."

Janeway looked at him in surprise. "I didn't know you studied pre-Atomic literature."

"I don't, but I was once stuck on a long Hohmann trajectory to the New Earth colony on Venus. I must have played every book in their Arkive. Anyway, I agree with Dante. Mankind has a higher purpose than fighting and watching feelies. We would never have made it into Outer Space if we were meant to scrabble about in our own ashes."

"A soldier and a philosopher," mused Janeway. "Your intelligence file doesn't do you justice." She turned to the first _canto_ and read aloud:

_"In the middle of the journey of our life,_

_I found myself astray in a dark wood_

_where sight of the straight road had been lost._

_How hard it is to say what it was like_

_in the thick of thickets, in a wood so dense and gnarled_

_the very thought of it renews my fear._

_It is bitter almost as death itself._

_But to set forth the good it also brought me_

_I will speak about the other things I saw there."_

Janeway put the book back in the cabinet, gingerly pressing the null-gee restraints against the binding. She sealed the doors and turned to Chakotay.

"Why did you rebel against the Tri-World Federation?" she asked bluntly.

Chakotay had been expecting the question, but had no intention of making it easy for her. "Isn't there a tradition about not discussing politics in the officer's wardroom?"

"Or women, as I recall. I never understood why Spacefleet has to follow naval traditions. The pioneer aviators who were the first to leave the surface of the Earth: Amelia Earhart, Chuck Yeager, the Wright brothers—those are the ones we should look to for inspiration."

"Fair enough," said Chakotay. He put the drink bulb back in its slot. "I'll answer your question if you tell me why you mutinied against your captain on the _Valkyrie_."

"There was no mutiny. Captain Qu had gone insane. We detained him under orders from the senior remaining medical authority."

"Most people do go insane if you shut them in an air-lock for ninety-seven days with only a tankful of algae for company."

"He was lucky we didn't throw him out the other side." If they had been back in the Solar System, she would have told Chakotay to go jump out the air-lock himself. But they weren't, so maybe candor was the best way.

"Things were tense on the _Valkyrie_ even before the disaster," said Janeway. "The wardroom was something of an Old Boys Club. In Spacefleet Academy I'd been taught that an officer should maintain a certain distance, but ours preferred the hands-on approach, if you know what I mean. There was a lot of fraternization; favoritism shown to those girls who were willing to do favors in turn. It put a lot of pressure on the rest of us who were just trying to do our jobs. Then the meteorite hit..." ( _'And I had to seal the berthing compartment, sacrificing everyone inside to save the ship.')_ Tu'Vix, the Martian lieutenant who had refused to participate in the hazing conducted by the other officers, had reached the collision-hatch just in time to be cut in half.

Janeway took a deep breath. "The captain decided to put the _Valkyrie_ down on Mercury to wait for rescue. The planet is tidal-locked to the Sun so one side is always boiling hot and the other freezing cold, but Qu believed (incorrectly as it turned out) there was a thin region between the two where humans could survive. Somehow this idea of waiting for rescue turned into a grand vision of the first Terran colony on Mercury, using the female crewmembers as a baby factory to consolidate later territorial claims. No-one cared what we had to say about the matter."

"That sounds familiar."

"Really, Chakotay? I fail to see the resemblance. Didn't you defect to the Maquis to avenge your father?"

"My father was a spacer—so was I. Death is part of life in Outer Space. I rebelled because the government was going to take away our land, and not for the first time either."

"They weren't the Great Plains, Chakotay. Your homeland is an airless asteroid only 270 miles in diameter."

"Your body's only five-foot-five, but you were willing to risk your entire ship and everyone on board to protect it. Shouldn't you girls have just closed your eyes and thought of the Tri-World Federation?"

"We didn't mu... detain our officers to protect our chastity! We knew we could get the _Valkyrie_ to safety and we did! What were you hoping to achieve, Chakotay?"

"Something other than abject surrender! There are times you have to risk everything on principle, or what are those principles worth?"

The two officers stood glaring at each other for a long moment, then Chakotay sighed and planted himself in the nearest chair, fishing in his jacket for a cigarette.

"I didn't come here to fight," he said.

"That's good, because I came here to eat."

The meal was elegantly served by white-jacketed stewards on china plates with zirconium cutlery, a gift from the engineers who had built their Cochrane Drive. Prime Martian beef with lightly-steamed vegetables and a bottle of red wine, followed by coffee and yeast cake. The first Martian colonists had been a heterogeneous lot: Negro farmers fleeing the lynch mobs, Brazilian gauchos whose grazing land had been seized by the factory-farms, and refugees from war-torn Europe including a family of winemakers from La Barre in France, though it had taken years of hard work and scientific research to enrich the soil enough to grow anything. The food had a faint burnt flavor from the irradiation used to preserve it for long space voyages, but neither officer complained. With the food shortages on Earth everyone had long since learned to eat what was put in front of them.

"There was a time when every woman knew how to cook," said Janeway. "It's a lost art—all I know is how to push buttons on a menu selector. My mother was going to teach me..." ( _before the Bureau of Eugenics burnt the memories out of her brain—whatever happened in the bomb shelter after the lights went out—so she wouldn't pass on her trauma to her children) "_...but I was more interested in tinkering with radios and chemistry sets like the other girls."

"Well, you weren't lying about the coffee," said Chakotay. "It's a lot better than synthokaf. Is this really made from beans grown in the soil?"

"On trees, grown on the slopes of the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. It's a good thing those hard-working agrifood executives need coffee too, or the entire island would have been turned into a banana farm. Make sure you savor that cup. I'm down to my last bag, which I'm sacrificing to you in the interests of diplomacy."

They kept up such banter for a while, maneuvering around each other with words as they once had with rocketships, neither of them discussing the recent war or friends whom the other might have killed. Chakotay told the same old tale of his attempt to free the last bald eagle on Earth, while Janeway joked about her antics searching for non-existent treasure as a student on Mars. Chakotay found himself enjoying her company, this woman who had been trying to blast him into radioactive dust only a few weeks ago. When the captain seemed sufficiently at ease, he brought up the subject of B'Elanna Torres. "With her background and academic credentials she could work as a synthesist. There's too much narrowmindedness in the Science and Engineering departments. You need someone who can think outside the box, combine disciplines, find practical solutions. A Belter rather than an Earther."

Janeway flicked a glance at the stewards who were standing discreetly in the background. Without a word they filed out the hatchway—only after it had sealed behind them did the captain speak again. "B'Elanna Torres is a civilian, not a Spacefleet officer; I'm not putting her in a position of authority on this ship. You've got the pardon you asked for, Chakotay. Don't let it go to your head. This is a temporary arrangement, no more."

"Are you sure about that? We could be stuck together longer than you think. What happens if we can't find that cube-ship? It could be anywhere in the galaxy, or even in a completely different galaxy! And even if we did find those aliens, they might not be glad to see us. Last time they made First Contact with the Human Race you fired an atomic torpedo at them."

"I'm hoping for a more peaceful approach next time," said Janeway with a confidence she didn't feel. "Anyway, if Miss Torres is as smart as you think she is, the aliens on that space station could send us home in the wink of an eye. Provided they have eyes, of course."

"Provided they're willing to send us home at all."

"I'll cross that Einstein-Rosen bridge when I come to it."

Chakotay leaned forward, his dark eyes fixed on hers. "You're not thinking this through. There might not be any way back to the Earth that we know. Have you heard of time dilation? _Voyager_ was accelerated faster than the speed of light. We could get back home and find that centuries have passed! Earth could be a world as alien as anything we could find out here."

Janeway met his gaze evenly. "I don't know about you, but I didn't join Spacefleet to fight wars in the Asteroid Belt. I joined to be a scientist and an explorer. This crew will face whatever the future holds. And as their captain I will do my utmost to get every one of them home."

"This crew has to be prepared for the distinct possibility that they might never get home. If that's the case we need to search for a habitable planet and establish a colony. Think about it: a second foundation of Mankind on the far side of the galaxy. Insurance for our species if Earth is destroyed by social collapse or some other cataclysm. Maybe it's fate that we ended up here."

"I've heard this speech before, Chakotay!"

"So I've heard, and that's the problem. This isn't the _Valkyrie_. You're so fixated on getting this crew home, you've blinded yourself to other options."

Janeway forced herself to speak calmly. "You're the one who's not thinking this through. _Voyager_ isn't a colony ship; we've no race bank of embryos, no Arkive holding the accumulated knowledge of the Human Race. We have barely enough people to establish a stable population—even counting the extraterrans in our crew—and the slightest disaster would deplete those numbers. I've seen too many colonies fail due to poor planning and genetic inbreeding."

"Then we find a world with biologically-compatible aliens."

Janeway was aghast. "What you're suggesting is a direct violation of our Prime Directive!"

"Is this the right time to worry about Spacefleet's ban on miscegenation?"

"It's right in any circumstances! Ask your friend B'Elanna how good her life has been, caught between two worlds and belonging to neither!"

"Is that really what's bothering you, Kathryn? Perhaps you've been a Spacefleet captain for so long, you've forgotten that you're a woman with her own needs."

"I didn't know we were on a first name basis, Space Commander Chak__"

His arms were strong and his kiss was passionate. For a moment Janeway felt herself melting into his embrace, then she wrenched herself free and her palm cracked across his face.

For a moment they just stared at each other, breathing hard. What might have happened next neither could say, but the harsh blare of the bullhorn put an end to it.

_"GENERAL QUARTERS! GENERAL QUARTERS! ALL HANDS MAN YOUR BATTLE STATIONS! MULTIPLE OBJECTS ON INTERCEPT COURSE! SET MATERIAL CONDITION ZEBRA THROUGHOUT THE SHIP!"_

The alarm took everyone by surprise. When _Voyager_ set course for the alien space station no-one expected some rocketship bristling with rayguns to appear, demanding they heave-to in the name of the Galactic Patrol. Such warlike confrontations in the depths of the void were the fantasies of scientifilm. The speed of a modern rocketship was such that a defender would have mere seconds to intercept before the two vessels shot past each other (though psionic-guided weaponry was increasing that time). It made more sense to wait for an aggressor to decelerate and come within range of an overwhelming volley of interceptor missiles. Even in the Asteroid War the battles had taken place around the space stations and asteroid mines that were worth fighting over, not empty Space.

The two officers rushed to the jerry tube and found it packed with men and women swarming ape-fashion up the ladders. Janeway was gauging her jump to the nearest belt-lift platform when the ship lurched and she would have gone headfirst into the shaft if Chakotay had not grabbed her. A pallet burst sending its contents raining down on the people below. The passageway echoed with screams and curses and the belt-lift shuddered to a halt.

"Let me sort that out," Chakotay urged. "You're needed on the Bridge."

"Isn't there some Indian trick where you turn into a bird and fly me up there?"

"You're too heavy." Bracing a foot on the hatchway, Chakotay swung himself out into the jerry tube, using his body to block those climbing up from below. Ignoring their complaints, he yelled, "Make a hole! Captain, coming through!"

Janeway brushed past him and started to climb. The rungs were vibrating as if _Voyager_ were flying through the storms of Venus and she had trouble holding on. Weeks of null-gravity had taken their toll on her muscles and Janeway was exhausted by the time she got to the Bridge where everyone seemed to be shouting at once.

"__intense gravimetric disturbance! Accelerometers are jumping across the dials!"

"__coherent beam of electromagnetic radiation bouncing off our hull! They know we're here, but they're not turning away!"

"__two vessels... make that three... four! No, five... fifteen vessels!"

"So much for ESP! Why didn't you detect them earlier, Vor'K?"

"They were just _there_ , Pablo! They came out of nowhere!"

"Everyone quiet!" ordered Captain Janeway, having regained her breath. "Helm, maintain our course and heading. If they can see us, they know to avoid us. Sound collision, Mr. Rollins; I want every section sealed whether it's manned or not. Mr. Vor'K, load all torpedo tubes, maximum yield on the atomic warheads. Sparks, broadcast a standard hail on as many frequencies as you can manage. Try the signal lamp as well."

"Which language shall I use, ma'am?"

"It doesn't matter; they won't understand it anyway. Just make it clear we want to talk instead of shoot." Clutching the null-gee handgrips to steady herself, Janeway struggled across the lurching deck to her acceleration couch and buckled herself in. She snapped down the intercraft toggle. "Astrogation, I want eyes on those vessels now!"

"My God!" someone gasped, reverting to ancient superstition at the sight that appeared on the telescreens. Spacecraft like none of them had ever seen: saucers with cantilevered nacelles, spheres encircled with glowing portholes, squid-like monstrosities that looked grown instead of made. They flashed past on every side leaving _Voyager_ bucking in the turbulence of twisted space-time, like a native canoe caught in the wake of an armada of steamships. Then in an instant they were gone, stretched into infinite streaks of blue that vanished as suddenly as they had appeared.

"They've gone off our scopes, ma'am," said the Senior Radarman. "Whoever they were, they can outrun the pulses from our radar. That's faster than the speed of light."

There was a stunned silence on the Bridge. Captain Janeway struggled to keep the dismay off her face. Acceleration like that should have turned the crews of those spacecraft into pulp. What kind of technology were they up against here?

"Status, Mr. Rollins," she said quietly.

"Damage Control says we have atmospheric integrity in all compartments. Minor damage on Decks Four and Six. Space Commander Chakotay reports casualties in the Central Passageway. No fatalities, but he'd like the collision-doors to Sickbay unsealed."

"Do it." Janeway leaned forward to peer at a telescreen. It showed an ovoid pod tumbling through space, marked by a flashing beacon light. "It looks like our visitors have left us something. Atom bomb? Message buoy? Intergalactic garbage can?"

"No radiation detected," said Rollins. "Radar shows no metallic reflection, but there's a thermal signature. And it's venting gas... spectrometers show oxygen and nitrogen. That pod looks big enough to hold a man if he was scrunched up a bit, but if there's anyone inside they won't be alive for long."

"Grapple it and bring it on board." Janeway released her safety webbing and pried herself out of the couch. "Mr. Rollins, you have the Bridge. Have the space marines and a rescue team meet me outside the Hangar Deck."

Tom Paris was commanding the rescue team but even the six-foot Terran was dwarfed by the marines in their jetpacks and space armor. Unauthorized modifications to the latter showed the bitter experience of the recent Asteroid War. The red finish that looked so impressive on the parade ground had been burnished down to bare metal, then slathered in black and grey stripes like the disruptive camouflage of 20th Century warships. Oversized pauldrons had been removed and extra radiator fins added, the fault-prone collapsible helmet replaced by a sturdy asteroid-mining helm of armorglass and boron carbide. Bandoliers were packed with grenades, breaching bombs, thermite cutters, cans of hull-sealant, and clips of explosive bullets that would shred flesh but not pierce the hull of a rocketship.

"If possible I want a peaceful First Contact," said Janeway, feeling somewhat ridiculous addressing the towering space marines while in civilian dress. A Spacefleet captain was supposed to delegate tasks like this, to run things from the Bridge where she had all the controls and communications at her fingertips. But the past couple of months had given Janeway a crash course in leading men into danger, and she had learned the importance of letting them see you were willing to put your life on the line as well. There was too much of the old contempt for the military in Spacefleet, a residue of the atomic wars of the previous century when soldiers like these were mere radiation-fodder, controlled by drugs and hypnotic conditioning. "Even if the alien is hostile, it's essential that we take it alive for questioning. Shoot only in self-defense; I want all weapons set to stun."

"You heard the captain," growled Sergeant VanBuskirk. "Rubber bullets and tear gas only. Make sure you aim for the torso, not the white of its eyes. Those rounds can still maim."

"It's an alien—what if its eyes are in its torso?" asked Paris. The marines ignored him.

Janeway accepted an oxymask from the rescue team, making sure to pull the straps tight against her jaw, both for a proper air seal and to ensure that bone conduction would transmit her words to the built-in radio mike. "Captain to Hangar Control."

"Chief Petty Officer Nozawa here, ma'am. The pod is on board and the Hangar Deck has been pressurized. We just saw some kind of creature emerge and scamper out of sight, too quick for us to get a clear look. I could reduce the oxygen level and knock it unconscious..."

"No, I don't want to risk harming it. Turn off the lights; let's draw our guest out into the open. Is everyone ready here?"

"YES SIR!" was the response. Janeway had given up trying to get the space marines to address her as "ma'am". Their training was too ingrained.

Paris spun the wheel to unlock the hatch and hauled it aside. Moving quickly despite their cumbersome appearance, the marines rushed through the dangerous chokepoint, spreading out into a defensive formation on the other side. Janeway barely had time to join them before the hatch slammed shut again behind her.

The only light came from Hangar Control, a squat observation tower in the center of the hangar. The entire deck crew was crammed inside, peering anxiously through the canted windows. VanBuskirk switched on the blacklight projector and panned it slowly across the hangar, its infrared rays invisible to anyone who was not wearing snooper goggles. No bug-eyed monstrosity was exposed to their gaze. The only sound was the drip of condensation, the hum of air-renovators and the clinking of hoist chains in its artificial breeze. Then, faintly, came the sound of claws skittering on a metallic surface.

"Over there," someone said. Janeway caught a glimpse of a tail, the flash of white teeth in the dark.

"Chief, give us some light in here."

The glare of floodlights threw some areas into brilliant exposure, others into greater darkness. Though the hangar took up an entire deck it was congested with tanks of rocket fuel, loading mules and fire-fighting bots, racks of tools and munitions and spare parts. An ambulance pod and a marine breaching pod sat on the deck, both pitted with shrapnel scars and radiation scorch marks. Shuttleboats hung on their launch cradles: the saucer-shaped Aeroshuttle and the skeletal Type 6. The grapple-line was wrapped around the drum winch and the alien pod squatted on the arresting platform between the manipulator jaws. As the marines fanned out across the hangar Janeway went over to examine it. The pod resembled nothing so much as a large leathery egg, its upper surface splayed open in four petals. Janeway leaned over to peer inside...

The blast of a jetpack made her start; Janeway spun round to see a marine leap into the air and land nimbly on the Aeroshuttle's launch cradle. He shone his helmet lamp through the bomb-aimer's window. "Here kitty... Here kitty-kitty..."

Annoyed at her show of nerves, Janeway went back to the pod which appeared to be some kind of bio-organic technology. It was empty except for a translucent slime that she was careful not to touch, though it could well be harmless. She knew the Spaceborn used oxygenated fluid to fill the pressure-distribution tanks that enabled torchship pilots to withstand high-G's. Was that how the crews of those spaceships were able to survive acceleration to supra-light speed?

"Captain." Janeway looked up to see VanBuskirk towering over her. "The alien's gone to ground somewhere. With your permission, I'd like to use gas to flush it out."

"Do it," was her curt command.

The Y-rack launcher mounted on the sergeant's burly shoulders fired a half-dozen bomblets that bounced off the deckhead and spun into every part of the hangar, spewing clouds of white gas. Strobe lights flashed and a pre-recorded voice announced: _"Atmospheric contamination (Phenacyl Chloride) detected on (Hangar Deck)! Protection Level (Charlie-Charlie-Charlie) required!"_ , the alert repeating until Nozawa shut it off.

There was an ear-piercing screech from the Aeroshuttle and a dark shape erupted from its ramjet nozzle, slamming into the marine and knocking him off the launch cradle. His jetpack auto-fired to break his fall and he careered across the hangar, flailing blindly at the alien clasped to his face. Janeway cringed as they slammed into a rack labelled DANGER: MONATOMIC HYDROGEN sending cylinders of highly-volatile rocket fuel bouncing across the deckplates.

 _"ARGHH! Get it off me!"_ The alien was only half the marine's size but was hissing and spitting in fury, biting and clawing at his helmet and body armor.

 _"Corporal Rico, hold still!"_ shouted VanBuskirk. He took careful aim and the hangar echoed with the crack of a rifle shot. The creature yelped and fell to the deck where it writhed helplessly, winded by the impact of the rubber bullet.

Janeway took note of the intruder's clothing, its omnivorous teeth and opposable thumbs and ordered: "Everyone back off. Sergeant, secure those fuel tanks, then clear the Hangar Deck. Inform Mr. Rollins the crew can stand down from General Quarters. And get Mr. TuV'k down here. Tell him to bring a portable encephalo-adjuster."

As the marines filed out through the hatchway, Janeway sat herself down on a cargo pallet and studied the alien. It (or 'he' Janeway guessed from the lack of evident mammilla) had a squat body covered in yellowish-brown fur and a long prehensile tail, the rodent-like appearance scarcely diminished by plaid leggings, split-toe boots, and a rather tattered vest lined with many pockets. His face was a blunt muzzle framed with long ginger whiskers that formed a kind of beard, with a high forehead and dark brown eyes that gazed back at her with an all-too familiar intelligence. Janeway was not the type of girl to jump on the nearest chair and shriek when faced by a giant rat, but she could not deny a feeling of wrongness, of _alienation_ —the instinctive psychological rejection of a creature that was in the form and manner of a Man, yet was not.

Once the air-renovators had filtered out the tear gas, Janeway removed her oxymask and the alien took that as a cue to sit up on his haunches. He began to make elaborate gestures with his paws and tail, whistling and shrilling and crooning until Janeway's head hurt. She suspected that some of the sounds were pitched at frequencies too high for human ears.

"If that meant: 'Take me to your leader', I'm already here."

Janeway heard the hatch open and shut behind her. Footsteps crossed the deck and she sensed TuV'k's presence by her side.

"This fellow seems quite eager to talk," said Janeway, not taking her eyes off the alien, "but I can't understand a word."

"I have never attempted the _melding-of-minds_ with a non-anthropoid life-form, Captain."

"You've seen the power these aliens have: gravity manipulation, supra-light drive, anti-acceleration technology. Our next encounter could be a lot more dangerous. Until we can speak the language we're just blundering around in the dark. I need a Rosetta Stone."

The Martian sat down on the deckplates in a cross-legged position, similar to those used for meditation by the ancient mystics of India. He held a squat plastisteel box that he placed in front of him. He flicked switches and twirled dials. There was a hum of power as the micratomic pile and vacuum tubes warmed up. The alien shuffled over to watch the proceedings with evident interest. A rank stench arose from his body that the two Spacefleet officers did their best to ignore.

TuV'k put on a copper skullcap from which sprouted a cluster of trailing wires that plugged into the box. "You do not have to take part in this, Captain. Sharing one's mind with a sentient alien who is untrained in mental telepathy can be dangerous."

Janeway wordlessly held out her hand. TuV'k passed her another skullcap, plugged in a third and held it out to the alien. Janeway placed the cap on her head and gestured for the alien to do the same. He took the cap in his paws, sniffed at it, then tasted the copper with a long pink tongue. Janeway was wondering if she was going to have to call in the marines to hold him down when he abruptly perched the cap atop his florid plume of ginger hair.

TuV'k began to chant a mantra in a long-dead language, though Janeway knew its meaning from her years as a student on Mars: _my-mind-to-your-mind-my-thoughts-to-your-thoughts-our-minds-are-as-one._ These three people from three different worlds closed their eyes and saw...

_A great tree, the greatest tree in all the world, a world that was a vast forest that covered the moon of Rynax. When Father Talax was high and bright in the sky, his family would gather in song among the warrens and shelter-leaves and protein-buds: father and mother, sisters and brothers, their mother's mother, father's father, their sisters' sisters, their brothers' brothers—all the litters from all the generations of their endless family, all tending and singing to the Great Tree that loved and nourished them in return._

(...they saw...)

_Her father was a fireman. Her father would come home reeking of smoke from the books and vids he had burnt, the ones created by the fantasists they had been warned about in school. At night by the glow of a radium lamp, he would read to Kathryn from the pages he had saved from the flames. Tales of princesses and philosophers and scientists and explorers, of men of conviction and women of courage. Of heroes who walked among the stars and were not afraid to dream._

(...they saw...)

_For eight days and nights the students at the Scholarium ran amok. They cast down the Sentinel and pleasure-coupled in the corridors. They stole the spice reserved for vision quests and consumed it with abandon. They loudcast the strange music of Terra in the PsiDome, singing the nonsense words with voice and telepathy till all were caught in its thrall. The scholars fled the city lest their minds be swept away by the bacchanalia._

_Only the High-Master remained. He knelt in meditation under the apex of the PsiDome, ignoring the chaos, his mind disciplined against their madness. When a sandstorm forced the students there for shelter, they danced around the solitary figure and taunted him with lyrics from another world:_

Mister Sandman, I'm so alone.

Don't have nobody to call my own

Please turn on your magic beam

Mister Sandman, bring me a dream.

 _"Why should we listen to fossils like you?" demanded TuV'k. He had discarded his student cloak for skinsuit jeans and a floaterbike jacket with words in Terran-English printed on the back:_ Mars Needs Women. _His mind as always was on his Outworlder classmate with her exotic red hair, who roused dangerous passions. "Our world is dying, while the Terrans are vigorous and powerful and fear nothing. Let us adopt their ways and we shall be strong and fearless ourselves."_

_"You are a child," scolded the High-Master, though his voice was without rancor. "You see the freedom and strength of the Outworlders, but not what they have sacrificed to achieve it. You see their vigor but not their blindness. It is we who must teach them."_

(...they felt...)

_The sky brought flaming meteors whose impact threw up monstrous pillars of ash that blocked out the sun. The wind brought diseases that made the leaves turn brown and their fur fall out in clumps. Cloud-seeding brought torrential rains that drowned the warrens and turned the soil to squalid mud. Autonomous machines prowled the forest and patrolled the skies, slaying everything that lived._

_The Great Tree was a barren spire, strangled by vines of an alien hue sprouting poisonous seeds that they could not eat. The air changed, sucked into colossal machines belching clouds of green mist that drifted across the land, seeping into the deepest warrens, the most well-protected creche, killing all who breathed it._

_Father died. Mother died. Father's father and mother's mother and all their children died. When his sister Alixia died, he ate her flesh to fend off his hunger._

_By the time the colony ships landed, few were left alive to oppose them._

(...they felt...)

 _The captain spoke of eugenics, of a Second Foundation of Man, of the duty of Humanity to spread civilization among the stars. He was just getting to the best part—where the surviving men of the_ Valkyrie _would breed with the most attractive and fertile women on the crew—when three figures in oxysuits and bronze helmets filed in through the ventral air-lock. Ensign Kathryn Janeway, Assistant Astrogator Alice Keefer, and the sole surviving medical authority: Hospital Corpswoman Third Class Eve Maryk._

_"What are you girls doing here?" barked Space Commander Adams. "Get back to your stations!" Perhaps he thought they were a deputation of damsels come to bleat about their virtue. If the officers had looked at their expressions instead of their tight-fitting pressure suits, they would not have been so patronizing._

_"Doctor's orders, sir," said Kathryn, nodding towards Eve. She had a speech prepared, but none of these men deserved it. They had lost her respect long before the disaster that had stranded them here. "I don't know how to tell you this... but the wedding's off!"_

_Eve was holding a red globe that she hurled to the deck between Adams' feet. The fire grenade shattered, filling the Bridge with choking white powder. The officers stumbled about, coughing and cursing._

_"Impetuous harlot!" screamed Captain Qu. Too late they saw the gun in his hand._

_At this range the rocket-propelled bullet had not expended its fuel when it pierced Eve's oxysuit, and the pure oxygen within went up in a sheet of flame..._

(...they felt...)

_A soundless cry of fear swept through the watchers as the giant landing glider passed silently over their heads—larger than any bird of prey, pristine white but for the blue globe of an alien world painted on the underside of its wings. A cry that spread in a telepathic warning to all parts of the city, even to those laboring in the catacombs deep under the red sand. Driven by the same compulsion men donned masks of metal and reached for their hive-guns, women smashed priceless crystal ornaments and plucked with bloody fingers the sharpest shards, children dropped toys and books to take up sticks and rocks. The thought amplified and reinforced as it passed from one Martian to the next, like white corpuscles swarming to fight an infection: 'Kill the invaders from the third planet, kill the not-people, kill... kill... kill...'_

(...they understood...)

_Capture, enslavement, fear, pain, sickness, despair. Death for many, more often through the indifference of their captors than active malice. But his people had adapted. The cities and vessels of the invaders were not unlike the Great Tree: machines that provided shelter and nourishment, and they had burrowed within them like vermin, learning their crannies and workings._

_Then came escape, and the years of scavenging and trading and grifting to survive, and all the time yearning for the song of the Great Tree, for the warmth of his kin who were long gone..._

(...they understood...)

_The convex windows showed the vista below but none of the children paid attention to the monotonous and familiar sight. Endless fields of corn and soybeans, bathed under the pseudo-sunlight of the orbital mirrors. Freight-tubes and rolling roads that vanished across the horizon, robot harvesters and factory-farms and the occasional weather control tower. Once they flew over a lake that was green from shore to shore, host to a vast algae farm._

_"I used to go fishing there with my father," said the old man who flew the school aerobus. It was the only time he had ever spoken to her. "All the fish are gone now."_

(...they understood...)

_As an Adept of the Histories he wandered the ruins of Silas—the canals filled with sand, the mindscapes and observatories, the Labyrinth of Isen now open to the sky—but enlightenment did not come. Tri-vid advertisements drowned the whispers of psychic-ghosts, the libraries had been razed by Martian converts to the religions of Earth, the catacombs used to store nuclear waste. Even well-meaning efforts of the Outworlders were jarring. Safety barriers barred access to the Tesseract Maze, and the restoration of the Palace of Gi seemed incongruous without the society it had once served._

_But in a tiny courtyard that had escaped the attention of tourists and archaeologists alike, TuV'k found what he sought. A single perfect arch, the windward-side eroded to a bone whiteness, while the inner surface retained the colors of hieroglyphs so ancient even the High-Master would not have understood them. In this pristine monument to the passage of Time he could contemplate the nature of entropy, see Mars not as a dying world but a changing one, this invasion of Outworlders as just another stage in the RRRRRRED PLANET RRRRROAST, ONLY FFFFIFTY CENTS!_

_Startled from his meditative posture TuV'k toppled into the sand, hounded by tri-vids that danced and spun around him. After days of fasting he began to salivate as odorophonics filled the air with the scent of cooking food. The projector was mounted on a burger-shaped bot on caterpillar treads that had followed him into the courtyard, tracking the carbon dioxide emissions of his breath. "GENUIIIIINE MEAT, GROWN IN THE VATS OF YOUR LOCAL RRRRRRED PLANET RRRRROAST!" it blared, heedless of the rocks that TuV'k hurled at its armored carapace. The robot responded with a barrage of coupons that added their own inane chatter, chorusing in tiny voices as they fluttered through the air: "Burgers-soyshakes-and-fries! Burgers-soyshakes-and-fries! Only fifty cents a burger at your local Red Planet Roast!"_

_"Don't sell yourself to the enticements of decadent capitalism!" urged a sword-waving specter of the ancient heroine T'Srrn the First (though TuV'k doubted a real princess of Mars would have worn the garb of a lower caste peasant-soldier). It took a moment for him to locate the second tri-vid projector; a crab-like robot coated in chameloflage paint, color-shifted to match its surroundings. The Eastbloc robot must have been stalking its American counterpart for some time. "Join your socialist brothers on Earth who support you in the fight against colonialism! Cast off the Overmind of your Martian oppressors and establish a true workers paradise on the Red Planet!"_

_"RRRRRRED PLANET RRRRROAST!" blared the American bot, raising its volume to ear-splitting decibels to drown out the Communist agitprop. "ONLY FFFFARRRGKH!!!" it cried as a messenger rocket slammed into its carapace and exploded in a shower of propaganda leaflets, sending the robot skittering out of control. TuV'k watched aghast as the battling bots crashed into the arch and sent it toppling down on them both..._

"You've never shown me _that_ memory before," said Janeway, removing the copper skullcap from her head.

"Were I to recall every idiocy perpetuated by your species," said TuV'k dryly, "I would have little time for more productive endeavors."

"Astounding! Amazing! Such incredible tales!" If the memories aroused by the _melding-of-minds_ had upset the alien he refused to let it show. "You must teach me how to use this scientific wonder! It would avert many hours of tedious translation! And to think you have come from so far away! Let me offer my services as a guide. Allow me to introduce myself." He made a high-pitched sound that seemed mostly beyond their aural range; they heard only: _"Neee"_ and _"Lix!"_

"Captain Kathryn Janeway, of the Tri-World Federation rocketship _Voyager_. This is Tech Lieutenant TuV'k, my Tactical Psionics Officer." She knew this alien was not suddenly speaking Terran-English; it just seemed that way as her own mind sought to put his extraterran thoughts into a familiar context. It would still be necessary to have him teach them whatever universal language was used by these aliens. "Do you know this area of Space well, Mr... umm, Nee'Lix?"

"I am _famous_ for knowing it well," Nee'Lix bragged. "Perhaps not that well," he admitted, after he was shown a stereograph of the cube-ship that had brought them here. "I can't say I've ever seen a spacecraft like that before... but it's a big Universe you know! Let's just say I am well-travelled... though not as well as you, of course! So... you say this vessel whisked you away from another part of the galaxy and brought you here against your will? Sounds like K'Zon space pirates to me."

"Space pirates?" queried Janeway. Such crimes happened more in tri-vid melodramas than in real life. Robbery on the spaceways was usually an inside job, or privateers for governments trying to muscle out rivals in their never-ending cold wars. The few criminal syndicates that could afford to buy and maintain rocketships preferred to spend their money on more cost-effective ventures.

"The K'Zon and the Hirogen. They work as mercenaries for the Briori, the species that controls passage through the black star portals," said Nee'Lix, discussing the impossible as casually as a Terran would mention a flying car. "They use the portal network to raid other parts of the galaxy for slaves and technology, so the Briori can study them."

Janeway was glad that Chakotay wasn't there to see her embarrassment. It looked like she owed Miss Torres an apology. "Can we use these 'portals' to travel back to our own Solar System?"

"Certainly! Well, possibly... maybe not. It all depends if you can convince the Briori... they're not the easiest people to get along with. I prefer to stay as far away from them as possible, to be honest. I was able to get passage by hitching a ride on that convoy that passed you earlier, but there was a misunderstanding about a food replicator and they dumped me here. I do hope you Federation types aren't so unreasonable when it comes to sharing your technology?"

 _'Some things don't change no matter what part of the galaxy you're in'_ , thought Janeway. "Of course, we would compensate you for your assistance. As yet we have no local currency but I'm sure some form of barter can be arranged..."

"That sounds quite reasonable! How about we discuss the price of my services over... uh, a meal?"

Janeway smiled. "Mr. TuV'k, notify the Disbursing Clerk that a civilian contractor wishes to discuss terms of employment. Make sure our guest has a chance to use a refresher and get something to eat before every amateur xenologist on the ship starts badgering him." She stood up to leave, then added, "Oh, and have B'Elanna Torres report to my cabin. It looks like I need to brush up on this Einstein-Rosen bridge theory."

**Chapter VIII: THE ARRAY**

According to Nee'Lix, the space station orbiting the black star had had many names over the millennia, but nowadays most people just called it the Array. It was the Outer Rim terminal of a network of portals that spanned the galaxy, the work of an ancient species whose existence would be attributed to myth were it not for this undeniable evidence of their technological prowess: a gargantuan cylinder of super-dense material allegedly mined from the collapsed star itself, impervious to Time or the efforts of lesser species to fathom its nature. Wars involving weapons of terrible destructive force had been fought over the portals without inflicting the slightest damage—except of course on the colonies that invariably clustered on their outer surface like barnacles on the hull of an ancient sailing ship. Thousands of derelict spacecraft—ranging from tiny lifepods to colossal generation ships—had been permanently moored to makeshift docking cradles and converted into trading posts and habitats and manufactories. Their portholes and beacon lights cast a baleful lumination in the absolute dark of the black star, ugly and beautiful as an anglerfish in the sunless ocean depths.

From where he sat on the prow of the shuttleboat, Tom Paris could see at least a dozen spacecraft lined up inside the cylindrical interior of the Array which—unlike its congested outer surface—was as bare and smooth as a gun barrel aimed at the heart of the black star. Exactly how the portal worked was a mystery. The technos and eggheads had been arguing over the subject since they first arrived, throwing around terms like 'transwarp conduits' and 'graviton catapults', but when Paris had suggested the portal could dematerialize a rocketship and beam it across the galaxy like a radio signal, the Science Department and the Glowing Gang had agreed for the first time ever by deriding teleportation as Fortean nonsense that would require more energy than was available in the entire Universe, and violated Heisenberg's Theory of Uncertainty as well.

There was a silent flash of light and the convoy vanished before his eyes. Paris turned his head towards the black star, but all he could see were the focal points painted on the inside of his bubble helmet to avert space madness. The star was still millions of miles away and quite invisible.

He pressed down the chin-plate to switch his radio to 'send'. "Let me get this straight, Nee'Lix. The Briori give safe passage to spacecraft passing through the portal network, while using that same network to send out their pirates to seize other spacecraft and drag them back here, so they can be stripped down and fixed to the Array like trophies?"

"You've got it, Mr. Paris." The latest addition to their crew was peering through the viewing slit of a decompression shelter-balloon that had been lashed to the observer's seat. It was the only spacesuit available that could fit his non-anthropoid frame. "Sometimes the passage isn't that safe either. It's not unknown for a K'Zon warship on convoy escort to be attacked by another K'Zon sect out raiding. They say the Briori secretly encourage this to keep the sects at each other's throats, so they won't join forces and seize the portal network for themselves. It's an uneasy alliance all round."

Three days had passed since _Voyager_ first matched velocities with the Array, and their arrival seemed a matter of little import. No space pirates had bothered them (apparently the Briori preferred to keep trouble far from their own bailiwick) but Captain Janeway had decided to keep the ship well clear so they would have the freedom to maneuver if needed. That meant ferrying everyone over by shuttleboat and _Voyager_ only had three of those, one of which was being cannibalized for spare parts after sustaining damage during the Resettlement. Paris was piloting a Type 6, a bare-bones shuttleboat designed to operate solely in Outer Space. Just two seats and a control board wired to a rocket engine, propellant tanks and a couple of thruster rings, all bolted to a latticework cage to which cargo pods, radiosondes or automatic cannon could be attached to adapt it to any task. Easily modified and repaired, they were the workhorses of Spacefleet.

The radio circuit crackled with words that Paris recognized as Traben, the language of a long-vanished empire that had once dominated this part of the galaxy. Their language had persisted as a _lingua franca_ that had been put down on hypno-educator tapes by Nee'Lix during a lengthy session with the xenolinguists. Paris still had a headache from all that sleep-learning, but the advantage of Traben was not that it was easily learned (it wasn't) but that it was capable of being pronounced by human tongues.

"Mr. Paris, we're cleared to go."

"...where no Man has gone before," Paris muttered. He toggled a row of oversized switches, clasped the pincers of his space armor around the control yoke and eased it forward. There was a noiseless vibration and he was shoved back into his seat as the engine fired. Back home this would all be done automatically, their robot-pilot locked onto a radar beacon, but Federation-standard electronics were not designed for anything out here.

 _'This is how flying should be done'_ , thought Paris. _'By the seat of your pants like Father did in the War'._

As the Array filled his field of vision Paris turned on the landing beacons, the searchlights illuminating the Sargasso Sea of derelict spacecraft. He flew between the vast metal ribs of a gas giant miner, a-crawl with crab-like beings bereft of pressure suits, the blue-white flare of welding torches shining from between their claws. He saw an ocean in space, floating like a bubble inside a transparent globe tethered to the hull with gossamer cables. Swarms of podcraft maneuvered in precise formations like dancing bees. An atomic sun orbiting the Array brought an artificial dawn, invoking nostalgic memories of the ruins of New York City (though that had been behind several inches of leaded glass while their teacher droned on about the evils of global conflict).

"Over there," said Nee'Lix. A mushroom-shaped dome was positioned clear of the hull on a slender spire. As the shuttleboat neared, it opened like the eye of a giant monster pondering the approach of prey.

"Ahhh Mr. Paris, we need to slow down..."

"Relax, my furry friend." Jets flared on the thruster rings and the shuttleboat pitched end-over-end; the classic 'skew-flip turnover' to reverse direction so the main engine could be used to decelerate a rocketship. A long burn and some delicate use of the thrusters brought them onto the landing pad with barely a bump. The dome slid shut above their heads and began to fill with air; silently at first, then increasing in volume as the interior filled with an atmosphere. Paris unstrapped himself and grabbed a hawser cable, only to find there weren't any cleats on the landing pad to fasten it to. Nee'Lix had said that the Array had an 'artificial' gravity—something to do with technology involving 'negative mass' (hadn't B'Elanna mentioned something about that?) but he had not believed it until now.

The roaring of the vents ceased. Paris checked the dials fixed to the back of his space gauntlet. "Barometric pressure at 11 psi. That's a touch less than we're used to, but not enough to need pressure suits. Synthetic atmosphere consists of oxygen and nitrogen in breathable proportions." _'Well that should make talking to dames easier'_ , he thought. _Voyager_ used an oxygen-helium atmosphere to reduce the risk of fire, but it made you sound like Daffy Duck. He undogged his shoulder yoke and swung back his helmet, making sure to breathe slow and deep to compensate for the low pressure.

"See, what did I tell you?" said Nee'Lix, struggling out of the shelter balloon with evident relief. "This section is specially adapted for warm-blooded oxygen-breathers like us. Now if you were a lightworlder or breathed ammonia, you'd have to land elsewhere. Why I remember this cytoplasmic life-form who had become somewhat attached to me..."

Paris paid no attention to his rambling, stripping off the bulky space armor and superfluous magheel boots and stowing them in a container behind the pilot's seat. From underneath the seat he slid out a plastisteel box and released the magnetic seals. Packed inside was a pair of saddle shoes made of genuine Martian leather, high-waisted plasto-textile pants, and a garish shirt fastened with manually-operated buttons that he donned with reverence.

Freed of his restraints, Nee'Lix loped to the rear of the shuttleboat and rapped a claw on the white transport pod. "Wakey-wakey, everyone! Hibernation time is over!"

There was a muffled _clunk_ from inside the pod and the clamshell doors swung upon to reveal a dozen people crammed inside, far more than the regulation six passengers or two stretcher-pods it was designed for.

"Maybe we should buy a few more shuttleboats while we're here," said Paris, as the passengers untangled themselves. "I'm sure we can fit them on board _Voyager_ somehow."

He snapped up a salute as Captain Janeway clambered out, followed by Chakotay and TuV'k. All three officers were in full dress uniform: space-black tunic with mandarin collar, white magclip belt carrying a holstered pistol with a gold braid null-gee lanyard looped through the shoulder-boards, trim breeches tucked into highly-polished jackboots; even the peaked officer's cap that was usually worn groundside, and only then under open skies (headgear had long since fallen out of fashion in a society where most people lived in space stations or domed megacities). The other passengers were a far more colorful sight. Spacemen who routinely sneered at the flamboyant fashions of Terra now strutted in polychrome pants and custom-tailored zipsuits, while the girls wore spray-on sweaters, titillating glimpse-skirts, and high-heeled shoes that would be dangerous in any city with a slidewalk. Paris gave an appreciative wolf-whistle as B'Elanna stepped down to the deck in a flash of brown thighs, assisted by a helping hand from Ensign Vor'K and (to his surprise) Joe Carey.

"You look smashing," he said.

"Thanks," replied B'Elanna self-consciously, though her dress would have been regarded as quite demure on Venus. It had taken several hours of reprogramming to get the ship's mecho-tailor to produce something other than Spacefleet uniforms.

"Of course, nothing can quite measure up with this shirt," said Paris, puffing out his chest with pride. "This is an exact recreation of a 1954 Surf 'n' Sand Aloha. An American classic."

Carey smirked at his gay outfit. "If you're wearing that to impress the ladies, Paris, you might as well go back to _Voyager_."

"Now that's where you're wrong. You've got to be seen to get noticed, and I plan on getting noticed."

"Looks like we've been noticed already," said Kim. A rotund cylinder was rising from the center of the landing pad. When it reached a height of approximately eight feet, twin doors inset in its surface slid apart with a hiss of hydraulics.

"INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT!" Everyone gaped at the metal colossus that clanked into their midst, brandishing an unmistakable cluster of weaponry at the end of its accordion arms. "DO NOT RESIST!"

"I've seen this vid!" Paris quipped. "Satan's Robot Conquers the World!"

"An _armed_ autonomous android?" Janeway could not believe her eyes. "What kind of madmen are running this place, Nee'Lix? Who'd be stupid enough to build a robot that isn't subject to the First Law?"

"The Pralor, actually (it didn't work out well for them). Greetings, my mechanical friend! This is all just a misunderstanding. I speak on behalf of these aliens who are strangers to this sector and our ways."

"MY SCANNERS INDICATE CONCEALED WEAPONRY!" blared the bot. "ALL NON-AUTHORISED WEAPONS MUST BE SURRENDERED OR SECURED IN YOUR SPACE-VESSEL!"

"I was informed that ship's officers were allowed to carry personal sidearms, unless..." Captain Janeway whirled to glare at the assembled spacers. "All right you ruffians, cough up!"

Various pocket knives and work tools were produced with a resigned air by the Spacefleet personnel, well used to the ubiquitous surveillance of the Terran Security Administration. The Belters required some coaxing.

"Jonas, hand over that beam-welder!" demanded Chakotay. "I don't want you getting up to mischief. You too Hogan; these aliens aren't going to eat you. I know you're carrying more knives than that, Seska. B'Elanna, why exactly do you have a micratomic contra-rotating power-wrench in your purse?"

The illicit items were locked in the shuttleboat's toolbox but the robot refused to budge from its position in front of the door. The blank silver faceplate shimmered, then resolved into a photophone image of a fat glabrous face with dark beady eyes, tiny ears, vertical slits for nostrils and no neck.

"I am Overlooker Zet of the Central Hierarchy of the Array," announced the face on the android phone.

"An impressive title," replied Janeway, who could not help but think she was addressing a giant potato. "I am Captain Kathryn Janeway of the__"

"Be silent!" barked Overlooker Zet. "Failure to answer the following questions truthfully will result in punitive sanctions. Has any member of your crew been exposed to the Phage?"

"What's a Phage?" asked Kim. Chakotay nudged him to silence.

"We have never encountered this 'Phage'," said Janeway, keeping a reign on her temper.

"Are any of them suffering from space madness?"

"No more than usual," said Paris.

Janeway cast a scalding look in his direction. "That's a NO."

"Temporal psychosis?"

"No."

"Telepathically-induced hallucinations?"

"No."

"Have any of you been exposed to theta radiation, tetryon radiation, chroniton particles, metreon isotopes, polaric ion energy, macroviruses, biomimetic life-forms or photonic fleas?"

"I don't even know what any of those are."

"Have you encountered alternate timelines, sentient nebulas, spatial implosions, temporal inversion folds, dark matter life-forms, chrono-kinetic surges, electrokinetic storms, astral eddies, graviton ellipses, subspace sinkholes, subspace divergence fields or chaotic space?"

"I make sure to keep well away from them."

"Are you or have you ever been a member of the Psiborg Collective?"

"Never heard of it."

"Have you ever had intimate relations with a Bolian?"

"Certainly not!"

"State your business on the Array."

"We wish to arrange passage to our homeworld."

Zet raised a thin metallic slab before his eyes and stabbed it with a turgid finger. Colored lights reflected on his face and the slab beeped like an electroptical feedback panel on _Voyager_ 's Computer Deck.

"State your destination," he said.

"Earth."

"The next groundside transport is scheduled for__"

"The _planet_ Earth! Terra, third planet of the Solar System."

" _Which_ solar system?!" was the irritated retort. "What are the galactic coordinates?"

"How in Hubbard's name would I know?" said Janeway. "I can give you the spectra frequency of our sun, or local star charts if that's a help."

Zet had no eyebrows but somehow managed to frown regardless. "Name the sentient species that occupy your solar system."

"Terran, Martian, Venerian, Jovian, and some nasty slugs on Titan that you wouldn't want to meet."

More frowning and finger-stabbing. "Those species are not listed in our files. We do not accept stateless persons at commercial docking facilities. Refugees, abductees, or those seeking political asylum may submit the appropriate form__"

"Now look here, we just want to get home!" Janeway stood with arms akimbo and gave Zet the full force of her glare. "I need to speak to whoever is responsible for passage through your Universal Portal Network."

"The Caretaker of the Array has many demands on his time. There is a three _trikinn_ waiting period for passage through the UPN."

"How long is a _trikinn_?" asked Janeway.

"It's seventeen _nameks_ ," was the unhelpful response.

It took some time to establish that the Caretaker would not be available for some time.

"Do you wish to schedule an appointment?" asked Zet, after Nee'Lix and Janeway had worked out between them that three _trikinn_ added up to forty-seven Terran days.

"Yes," said Janeway wearily.

"You may return to this docking facility in three _trikinn_."

"We wish to enter now, thank you. My crew seeks trade and cultural exchange with the residents of this space station."

"I have no interest in their personal depravities."

"Oh, I give up! Just get us inside, Nee'Lix. Tell him whatever you have to."

While Nee'Lix and Zet argued away, _Voyager_ 's officers sorted out the liberty arrangements.

"Does everyone have their food tester?" asked Chakotay. "Don't just say, 'Aye, Space Commander'—show them to me." When they had he asked, "Do you all have your credit cards?" Each spacer produced a magnetic-storage card programmed with Traben Imperial Credits, accepted on the Array if not everywhere else. Negotiation of a reasonable exchange rate for a Federation-standard bar of lead-pressed uranium had taken up most of the time they had spent waiting for permission to board the Array.

"Now show me your communicator." This was a compact flip-open device, similar in appearance to the portable photophones in vogue on Earth but without the myriad features like vidcams or music players that groundsiders regarded as necessary. Spacers preferred the 'bare-bones' model: a rugged voice-only transmitter/receiver/locator beacon with the strength to blast a signal to an orbiting rocketship. "Hogan and Jonas, you're guarding the shuttleboat. Paris and Carey, come back and relieve them no later than four hours Shiptime from now."

"I realize you're eager to blow off steam after being cooped up on _Voyager_ for so long," said Captain Janeway, "but remember you are representatives of the Three Worlds. For the beings that you encounter, this will be their First Contact with your species. First impressions are lasting impressions, so make sure it's a good one. More to the point, if any of you get us thrown off this space station not only will you spend the next month in rad-suits cleaning the radioactive waste vents, but there will be over a hundred shipmates who will have something to say about being deprived of their own station leave. Now, is everything settled, Mr. Nee'Lix? Good, then tell this walking water heater to get out of our way."

The robot obediently clanked back into the elevator tube. No-one was in a hurry to follow until Janeway muttered, "Oh for Hubbard's sake!" and dived inside just as the doors began to slide shut—apparently activated by a photosensor as they immediately opened again. Five more spacers followed suit, nervously eyeing the robot's built-in arsenal.

"What now, Mr. Nee'Lix? Do we push a button? I can't see any."

"It's voice-activated, Captain. Just say: Promenade, Third Quarter."

"Promenade, Third Quarter!" The doors slid shut, leaving the others marking time.

"So just what is a Phage?" asked Kim, to fill the subsequent silence.

"It's a disease," explained Nee'Lix. "Quite virulent, very nasty. Trust me Mr. Kim, you don't want to know what it does to you."

"And why shouldn't you have sex with a Bolian?" asked Paris.

"That's something _I_ don't want to know!" snapped B'Elanna.

"All right then... what's the Psiborg Collective?"

Nee'Lix scratched an ear. "Umm... what would you call it in your language: a bogeyman? They existed hundreds of years ago; a radical movement of scientists who experimented with eugenic engineering, artificial augmentation, psychic gestalts... anything they thought would improve their species."

"Psychic gestalts?" asked Kim.

"The use of telepathy to join a group of people into a single overmind," explained Vor'K. "A dangerous procedure; the individual can lose their sense of self, whereupon the gestalt takes over."

"These Psiborgs said that if everyone joined their minds together it would lead to peace and universal understanding," said Nee'Lix. "It was a popular idea for a while, but the authorities didn't like how these overminds were not under their control; started to fear their strength, their influence. They said the Psiborgs weren't people any more; they had become something alien. There were propaganda campaigns, mass arrests, purges, pogroms, until eventually the Psiborg Collective was wiped out. Supposedly they're still lurking out in deep space or under our sleeping capsules, but it's just a story that people like the Caretaker use to crack down on anyone they deem subversive."

The doors slid open again to reveal an empty elevator and everyone filed inside.

"Promenade-third-quarter," rattled off Nee'Lix. The doors closed and indicator panels flashed in a downward direction, though they could feel no other sense of movement.

"So, the lift is controlled by the space station's Electronic Mind," stated Seska.

"Ahh no. There's a tiny electronic brain built into the maglev car. And that e-pad that Overlooker Zet was using. And just about everything else, really."

The Russian programmer looked flabbergasted. "You mean to say these people have thousands of electronic minds without central coordination? That is rather inefficient."

"And you call yourself a libertarian," quipped Paris.

"I call myself a New Soviet Techno-Socialist, you American shhh..." she trailed off as the doors hissed open and they were confronted by the sight of what lay beyond.

It was not their surroundings that were so unusual. The Promenade was recognizable as the former habitat ring of a Big Wheel-type space station, with bulkheads and collision-doors removed to create space for shops and service alcoves; nothing strange on Terran colonies where disused rocketships were routinely adapted as habitations or power sources. Neither was it the noise or the throng that was overwhelming—even the extraterrans on _Voyager_ 's crew had visited the overcrowded megacities of Earth. And every spacer (whether they admitted it or not) cultivated a self-image of being a Citizen of the Solar System, equally at ease on Venus, Mars or Terra. But the inhabitants of those planets all shared the same anthropoid form: one head, two eyes, two arms and two legs. It was only amidst this menagerie of aliens that it sunk in just how far they were from home. The crew of _Voyager_ stood gaping like schoolchildren on their first trip to Luna as Nee'Lix scampered around them, pointing out various life-forms.

"Those six-legged beings are Ovion, that gillman is from the ocean world of Monea, the avians are Banea, and would you believe those Drayans age backwards? Don't step on that centipede whatever you do—it's from Kelemane's World, which has a high gravity due to its extreme rate of spin, so the inhabitants are stronger than they look! Those reptilians are Voth, a species so ancient they can't even remember where their homeworld is, but I doubt it's any place you've been. Those fellows over there are Ba'Neth (they prefer to keep to themselves) whereas those Ponea are real party animals (that's literally—they're an Uplifted species). No, that's not a brain in a jar, Mr. Paris—it's a sentient sponge in a variable gravity tank. That fellow's a Malon core worker... some Kadi priests... a Mikhal Traveler... she's Ramuran I think (I can't remember anything about them). That huge rock is actually a silicon-based life-form... in fact I do believe it's a famous Tsunkatse gladiator! Those fellows are from Vega and refuse to eat meat, and those are Brenari who are telepathic, and those are Devore who don't like telepaths, and those tripeds over there don't like anyone but we don't hold it against them..."

A spacesuited figure appeared in their path, features concealed by the yellowish-green gas that swirled inside the helmet. Those closest caught a whiff of chlorine and took hasty steps back. "Long journey ahead?" hissed a voice from the helmet speaker. "I have Rhuludian pills at a very good price. Just one can make days of tedious space travel seem like moments of exquisite rapture."

"Beware!" Kim started in alarm as he was confronted by the proverbial bug-eyed monster, a misshapen blob covered in a forest of eyestalks that all seemed to be staring at him. "I see the many paths of your future! Seven years of torment await you! Pain, disease and death—lots of death! You shall suffer the agony of unrequited love, the machinations of deceitful women, and you won't get promoted either! Only by embracing the Way of Oooharrchalii will you be saved!"

"Don't pay any attention, young man. Those psychics are all frauds." An extraterran of the same species as Nee'Lix sidled up to them. He wore a plaid jacket in loud colors from which he fetched a pawful of sparkling gemstones. "Now _these_ are the genuine article! Lobi crystals, plundered by the K'Zon-Nistrim from the Crown Prince of Luria himself!"

"They look like diamonds to me," said B'Elanna, unimpressed.

"As if I would try that old crystalized carbon scam on such erudite spacefarers! Well if this doesn't catch your eye, young lady, how about some dilithium crystals?"

"Can't see why I'd be interested in them."

"Back off, Wix'Iban! These people are with me."

"Nee'Lix, you old scoundrel! They told me the Haakonians threw you out an air-lock! I wouldn't hire this fellow as a guide, my newfound friends. He couldn't find his way through the Nekrit Expanse without a map."

"Ask him if he saw which way the captain went," said Chakotay.

"If you mean some oddly-shaped aliens like yourselves who came out of the maglevator just before you did, they went to the Junkers Market," said Wix'Iban. "The K'Zon dump their stolen tech there after the Caretaker has finished playing around with it. I would be happy to give you a guided tour, as you are obviously strangers to this region. There are many dealers who will attempt to swindle you, but I can introduce you to the more reputable who (due to personal acquaintance) will offer significant discounts!"

"To Manhattan with that!" scoffed Paris. "I've only got four hours before I have to relieve Hogan. Where does one get a drink around here, Wix'Iban my man?"

"Not a problem, good sir! I know a tavern that serves the best leola root beer you'll ever taste!"

"You can get sozzled if you want," said B'Elanna. "Seska and I are going to check out that Junkers Market. With all those spacecraft being scavenged we might find something useful."

"I thought you Belters were supposedly to be hard-drinking rockriders," joked Paris, "but all you want to do is shop. I guess women are the same everywhere."

"So are men," said Seska, her scarlet lips curling in contempt. "If you want to slip away and break the Prime Directive while Janeway's not looking over your shoulder, don't let us stop you."

"Who me?" Extraterrans of a feminine appearance were gesturing to them from the darker alcoves of the Promenade Deck, wearing gossamer gowns that writhed with the movement of sensuous limbs, or maybe sinuous tentacles... "Now that you mention it," Paris said hastily, "I think I'll go with you after all. Might as well have an eyeball at what jets these aliens have."

**Chapter IX: THE CARETAKER**

It was some time before Chakotay and Nee'Lix found their captain and TuV'k on the shore of a sparkling ocean that stretched to the horizon under the radiance of twin suns.

"What the...?" Chakotay turned to stare in astonishment at the door he had just passed through and saw the bustling Junkers Market. Then the entrance faded to a translucent archway and his boots were sinking into a beach of varicolored sand. Where the door had once been, a greenish-purple rainforest ran all the way to the slopes of a distant mountain range, where light flashed on the wings of ornithopters hovering and swooping in the thermal updrafts.

"Sikaris, the Planet of Pleasure!" Nee'Lix threw off his jacket and rolled on the beach with glee. "It's been a while since I had a good sand scrub!"

"What in Space is this, Nee'Lix? We can't be on a planet, surely?"

"Oh no!" exclaimed Nee'Lix. "It's just like your Illusionarium! Well, not like it actually... a bit more advanced. A lot more advanced. In fact, it's so advanced it's not like your Illusionarium at all. But the concept is the same."

Chakotay crouched down and scooped up a handful of sand. He let the multi-hued grains trickle through his fingers, watching as they changed into a fine grey powder that somehow turned back into sand the moment it touched the beach.

"Resequenced photons," said Nee'Lix, brushing the same type of powder from his fur. "Shaped energy fields. And don't ask me how it works, Mr. Chakotay..."

"...because I'm not an engineer!" they chorused in unison. It had been a familiar refrain over the past few hours. There had been plenty of traders willing to sell technology whose effects were indistinguishable from miracles, but those few who claimed to be familiar with their workings were tight-lipped on the subject.

 _'We can add this to the million other things we'd like to study here,'_ Chakotay thought _, 'if only we had a couple of decades, a team of eggheads, and one of those Electronic Minds that take up an entire megacity block.'_

Their shipmates could be seen as distant figures a mile down the beach, but when Chakotay and Nee'Lix began to walk in their direction they found themselves on top of them much sooner than expected. When Chakotay glanced behind him he saw it was now the entrance arch that appeared far away, due to some kind of optical illusion.

"Did you find anything interesting?" asked Janeway. The two officers were sitting on a slab of limestone that hung out over the water. The captain had removed her jackboots and was dangling her toes in the ocean; Chakotay paid discreet attention to her bare ankles and sand-speckled feet. "Death ray, spacewarp drive, biologically-compatible extraterran?" She cast a coy smile at TuV'k who was seated in a posture of Contemplation, naked in his undershirt with his cap and tunic neatly placed on the rocks beside him. "Space Commander Chakotay thinks we should settle down on a planet with a harem of cute aliens."

"Well that one has nice legs," said Chakotay, pointing at a ten-foot insectoid stalking through the shallows. He dropped his haversack in the sand and sat alongside the captain. Janeway had been keeping a frustrating distance after what happened in the wardroom. Every time he tried to get her alone, TuV'k always seemed to be hovering around. "B'Elanna and Carey found some items that might be useful. A graviton compensator that we can use for anti-acceleration if we can make it work with our technology, and a pressor dish that projects a reverse gravity field to deflect space-dust and meteorites from the path of a spaceship even at supra-light speed. Don't ask me how 'reverse gravity' even exists; I guess if you can generate artificial gravity you can use it to do anything. I had them haul it all back to the shuttleboat."

"You did better than us," griped Janeway. "All we have are beads and baubles. Some huckster tried to sell me a 'replicator' that he said could make water from thin air, but it was just an atmospheric water condenser like we have on _Voyager_. And once word got round that we were seeking faster-than-light technology we were besieged by salesmen peddling investments in 'quantum slipstream drive' or 'transwarp thresholds'."

"The Briori sell their graviton technology to anyone with the money," said Nee'Lix. He unsealed Chakotay's haversack and rummaged through it without invitation. "I have an acquaintance in the K'Zon-Pommar sect who owes me a favor or three. He can get you a good deal on anti-gravity deckplates." He removed a tin of Alkian confectioneries and sniffed it.

"They weren't willing to sell to us," said Chakotay, plucking the tin from Nee'Lix paws—he'd bought the sweets as a present for the captain. "We had to get that graviton compensator second-hand from the Junkers Market. No-one knows where the Briori manufacture them, and no-one understands the principles behind their gravity manipulation technology... or perhaps they didn't think _we_ would understand. Half of the people we talked to treated us like dim-witted barbarians because we're from some planet they've never heard of."

"We are barbarians," said Janeway, splashing the ocean with her toes. "This is supposed to be a tri-vid illusion but it feels like real water... TuV'k actually went swimming in it! There are people out there fishing, and eating what they catch! How is that possible?" A trio of amphibians lifted their heads up from under the water, studying Janeway with plaintive expressions. She quickly withdrew her feet. "Shoo! I told you before, I'm not your mother!"

"I think I know how Chief Sitting Bull felt when he toured the cities of pre-Atomic America," said Chakotay. "We're too far behind these people; we need to catch up fast. With this kind of technology these extraterrans could conquer Earth without breaking a sweat."

TuV'k's eyes were closed but his sharp ears must have been taking in every word because the Martian put in his own two cents. "The xenophobic response of a species that assumes its technological and cultural supremacy is an innate characteristic instead of a fleeting moment in history."

Janeway tossed her head. "So says the man who told me he joined Spacefleet to defend his world from a race of implacable aliens bent on conquest and assimilation."

"Jovians?" asked Chakotay.

"Humans," replied TuV'k. The Martian opened his eyes and took in his surroundings. On the beach a dozen fleshy pyramids whirled and spun in an intricate dance, watched by a crowd of onlookers who clacked tusks or clicked mandibles in time to a baroque beat. What looked like a trunkless elephant with six legs was splashing about in the shallows, trying to push a large floating ball against a pole defended by a team of gillmen. In the distance a spider-like creature and a writhing mass of tentacles worked the sails of a multi-hulled hydrofoil. "You see threats where I see diversity, monstrosity where others see endless possibility."

"Few of these people are here by choice," said Nee'Lix. "Most were abducted by the Briori, others are refugees from cataclysm or persecution, some just have nowhere else to go. They get sold and used and discarded... but they adapt, survive, form communities... thrive even."

"That's something to consider," said Janeway. "We could be looking at the future of the Federation. Not just three worlds, but many! Hundreds of species, thousands of cultures, living and working together in har _rrrrgggggghh!"_

The world around them vanished for black walls that were suddenly too close for comfort. Avians screeched in panic as they found their airspace restricted, weaving and diving to escape collision. Bathers and sailors found themselves thrashing about on a hard metal deck, gillmen choking and convulsing in the shock of exposure to air. Janeway was struggling to pull on her jackboots while TuV'k was trying to retrieve his tunic from under the feet of a bellowing hexapod. The air filled with cries in a hundred languages that were quelled as abruptly as they had begun, and every eyeball and eyestalk turned in the same direction.

A pair of seven-foot high reptilians filled the entrance archway. Toothed and clawed like the dinosaurs of primeval Earth, their scaled bodies were decorated with warpaint and bone fetishes, yet girded with plastimetal armor and sophisticated electronic sensors. Heavy-caliber rifles mounted with blacklight scopes were clasped in their talons. Their unblinking gaze tracked across the room until it locked onto the three Spacefleet officers.

"Uh-oh, trouble." Chakotay helped the captain to her feet, then casually placed a hand on his holster. It unlocked on sensing his palmprint, pushing the butt of the Colt recoilless into his hand. TuV'k followed suit, moving several yards to the left to divide their attention.

"Who are they, Nee'Lix?" Janeway put on her officer's cap and stood with her hands resting on her hips, a position that put them conveniently close to her own sidearm.

"Hirogen hunters," whispered Nee'Lix, pressing low against the deck as if gripped by a genetic instinct to burrow for safety. "The Briori pay them to capture other life-forms and bring them back to the Array for study and enslavement. Otherwise they kill those they hunt: for sport, prestige, breeding rights, training for war. They've been doing it for centuries."

With claws scraping on the metal deckplates and spiked tails lashing from side to side, the two Hirogen stalked through the crowd which quickly made way for them. One kept his eyes fixed on TuV'k while the other stared at Chakotay, who could not suppress a shudder of revulsion at being caught in that reptile gaze. He dropped his eyes in apparent submission, but actually so he could watch their weapons for any aggressive move.

The Hirogen stopped a couple of feet away. The larger of the two took out a tubular device and hissed at length into an inset grill. As he did so, words in Traben emerged from the device in a harsh electronic tone.

"We hunt/seek [ambiguous syntax] Alpha/Captain of space-vessel from planet Ground/Earth [ambiguous syntax] of solar system How In Hubbard's Name Would I Know. As client [emphasis], not food/trophy/captive. The Caretaker orders/requests [ambiguous syntax] your immediate attendance."

"Looks like we've been moved to the front of the line." Janeway stepped forward, though her head only went up to the Hirogen's chest. "I am Captain Kathryn Janeway of the planet Earth, commander of the United Nations Rocketship _Voyager_."

"You [emphasis] Alpha/Captain [question fact]?" scoffed the Hirogen, staring down its snout at the short Terran.

"Me, Alpha Captain, confirm fact," said Janeway, glaring right back at him. "Now take me to _your_ leader."

"I can't believe you actually said that," muttered Chakotay.

Any feelings of technological inferiority felt by the Spacefleet officers was soon offset by the convoluted path they had to take to their destination. In contrast to the efficient mass transit systems of Earth, travel through the maze of reconditioned spacecraft-turned-habitats involved an endless number of air-locks, transfer tunnels, maglevators and conveyor strips, or long waits at vacuum-tube stations while their Hirogen escort growled with impatience and commuters stared at them in idle curiosity.

"Roll up, roll up!" quipped Janeway. "See strange anthropoids from the other side of the galaxy!"

"Makes a change from you Terrans gawking at my ears," said TuV'k.

A long silver pod slid along the vacuum tube until it locked into place opposite them like a bullet loaded into the chamber of a gun. Doors slid aside and the crowd pushed forward, only to back away when the Hirogen snarled and brandished their weaponry. They took their seats and the transit pod set off the moment the doors were sealed. There was no feeling of acceleration; the view through the convex windows flashed past faster and faster until it merged into a grey blur which abruptly changed to total blackness.

It took them a moment to realize they were looking at Outer Space from an armorglass tunnel that ran along the exterior of the Array. Janeway and Chakotay could not hide their shock. No Terran engineer would build this way; exposure to the infinity of the void without mental preparation risked the onset of space madness. They gripped the armrests with white-knuckle intensity, eyes casting about in desperation for something (anything!) to focus upon. What they saw only convinced them they had indeed lost their minds.

An ancient castle, alien in architecture yet unmistakable in grandeur, had been erected on the hull under a huge transparent dome. Battlements to defend against obsolete weapons of war, roofs steepled against rain and snow that no longer fell, flagstaffs where there was no wind to billow standards. As they closed with the anachronistic structure, they could see gun barrels protruding from embrasures of armorglass and plastimetal, brick-faced spires concealing sensor dishes and broadcasting antennae. Yet the appearance remained of an edifice uprooted from the earth to be transplanted in its current location regardless of design or logic.

"How in Space did _that_ get here?" exclaimed Janeway. "They can't have hauled that thing in the cargo hold of a rocketship, unless they did it brick by brick!"

"That castle is nothing," whispered Nee'Lix. Their guide had fallen unusually quiescent as they neared their destination. "The Briori used to lift entire cities into Space with spindizzy drives, tear them apart for their technology and dump the remains, sometimes with the populace still in them. I've seen vast craters and empty roads that are all that's left of global empires. They regret such actions now, of course. Far too wasteful. These days when their pirates turn up in orbit, everyone just hands over whatever they demand to make them go away. It's all very civilized."

The pod shot through an air-lock that opened and closed without the slightest pause in their passage, then slowly slid to a halt amid an overcrowded reception area where hundreds of life-forms argued, pleaded, blustered and truckled with a stolid panel of Overlookers. Their Hirogen escort bulldozed a path through the throng, making a bee-line for a security-locked maglevator which climbed a hundred feet in less than a second and opened onto a banquet hall where they were gruffly told to help themselves until the Caretaker was ready to meet them. It appeared that an official wanting to see someone 'immediately' had the same connotations here that it would back home.

The hall was octagonal in shape and surmounted by a vaulted ceiling; such a waste of usable area on a space station far more evocative of wealth and power than the expensive appointments. Micratomic lights added a harsh radiance to artwork designed for more primitive forms of illumination, and the walls were lined with alcoves displaying ornate sculptures, arcane technological devices, fauna and flora preserved in transparent cylinders.

Dominating the hall was a triangular table, laden with a feast inconceivable on famine-wracked Earth. On the right, the Hirogen tore at their food with savage teeth and quaffed from skulls that had been fashioned into drinking cups. On the left were the first anthropoids they had seen on the Array, though a serrated ridge of bone divided their foreheads and their hair grew in thick clumps instead of strands. Every man wore an armored cuirass under a fur-trimmed vest, with a pistol and short sword in crossdraw rigs for ready access while seated. Bodyguards prowled behind the diners, and no-one seemed willing to sit with their back to the door, as the side of the table facing the maglevator was lined with ornate yet empty chairs.

"I doubt this lot would be willing to embrace a Federation of Worlds," said Janeway. "Who am I looking at, Nee'Lix?"

"That's Imperator Jabin of the K'Zon-Ogla," whispered Nee'Lix, pointing with a surreptitious twitch of his tail. "Officially he's the ruler of all K'Zon, but that only applies as long as he can keep his sect strong and his rivals at bay. That man there—First Major Cullah of the K'Zon-Nistrim sect—has his own ambitions to be Imperator, as does Legate Haron of the K'Zon-Relora. Those Hirogen I'm not acquainted with, but the one seated on the chair made from the bones of his prey will be the Hirogen Alpha. I don't know his name—an Alpha will only reveal it to worthy prey, and that's an honor I'd rather avoid."

"They don't sound very friendly."

"The K'Zon were perpetually-warring barbarians on some insignificant planet on the outskirts of the galaxy when they were conquered by the Traben. As outsiders with no connection to the ruling elite they made useful recruits for the Emperor's Guard, and some of their officers became quite influential. After the Traben Empire collapsed they declared themselves its inheritors, but all they do is bully former subjects and fight each other for the title of Imperator—it's thanks to them this quadrant is in the mess it's in today. As for the Hirogen, their ruling matriarchy expels the males from their homeworld as soon as they come of age. They're allowed to return once every seven years with their hunting trophies as proof of their right to take a mate. The Hirogen believe that only the strongest among them should be allowed to breed."

"Sounds like the Bureau of Eugenics," Chakotay joked. "It's not a bad idea though. How about we arm-wrestle for the right to be captain of _Voyager_?"

"Excuse _me_ , Space Commander, but _whose_ shipbuilder plate is mounted in _whose_ wardroom?"

Janeway strode over to the table and pulled out a chair. Chakotay sat down next to her, as did Nee'Lix after some hesitation. TuV'k remained standing in imitation of the other bodyguards, his hand resting conspicuously on his sidearm. Naked servants rushed up bearing trays of food and goblets of wine, a sight that might have been titillating had they looked remotely human.

"By what right do you sit at our table, woman?" growled the man that Nee'Lix had identified as First Major Cullah.

"By what right do you sit at mine?" replied Janeway, causing the First Major to go purple with rage.

Affecting nonchalant indifference, Janeway picked up a knife and fork and carved off a slice of meat that had been set before her on a silver plate. Careful to mask any distaste at eating unprocessed food, she popped it into her mouth and chewed avidly, surprised at its taste and freshness. Non-irradiated meat on a space station? She examined the cutlery she was holding. The fork was handcrafted gold, with a weight that suggested more than gilding. The knife on the other hand was precision-engineered from stainless alloy, its handle had the warmth that came from a radiothermal power source and the edge of the blade glowed with a razor-thin beam of light. She looked around at the glittering array of dinnerware and realized that none of it matched. Exquisite craftsmanship both artistic and technological had been thrown together at random like the jumble sale of a mad millionaire.

"We're here by invitation of the Caretaker," Chakotay replied to Cullah. "We are representatives of the Tri-World Federation."

"Never heard of it," scoffed Cullah, "and I have raided worlds across the entire galaxy! This wine I am drinking is from the only bottle of Malkothian spirits in a thousand light-years! Those silver plates I seized from the Palace of the Moons in the Alsur Realm. And this female..." He seized the arm of the servant pouring the wine, causing her to cry out in pain. "She is the daughter of some high-and-mighty Archon! When the Turei refused to pay tribute, we bombarded their cities from orbit and took a thousand of them as slaves!"

"Trophies of the hunt!" The words were sibilant yet recognizable Traben. Unlike the hunters who had brought them here, the Hirogen Alpha appeared to be fluent in the language. "But was the hunt fair?"

"Fair?" Cullah scowled, as if uncertain of the meaning of the word. "We take these trophies by right of conquest, as do you Hirogen!"

"You entered their cities with superior firepower against a weakened prey," hissed the Alpha. "Do you really deserve these... trophies?"

"Why should we take the trouble to create such luxuries when we can seize them from others?" said Imperator Jabin. "We are K'Zon! We feast on the wealth and culture of other worlds! These people once kneeled to the Traben, so it is right they now pay tribute to us."

"Of what right do you speak?" asked the Alpha. "Are you stronger than the beings who inhabit these worlds? More cunning, more fearless, more determined in the face of adversity?"

"Of course," said Cullah. "Unlike some, we are not ruled by our women." He cast a contemptuous look in Janeway's direction, though the barb was clearly aimed at the Alpha.

The Alpha continued unabated. "And if you were alone on these worlds without your warships supporting you from orbit, would you continue the hunt? If your prey were armed instead of defenceless, what then?" A claw gouged splinters from the priceless wooden table. "You are superior to no one, K'Zon! Never underestimate your prey or disrespect its abilities! If you do, then _you_ will become the hunted!"

"Enough!" said a voice from behind them. "I apologize for the manner of my business associates, Captain Janeway. They insist on maintaining the cultural values of their primitive ancestors. We Briori have more sophisticated tastes."

Janeway turned in her seat. From the maglevator floated a discoid vehicle piloted by a slightly-built figure, anthropoid in appearance but for his grey pallor and oversized cranium. He sat within an armorglass dome enclosing a green-tinged atmosphere, and his frail arms were inserted into waldo gloves for a ring of prosthetic manipulators racked around the outside of the hover-craft. It was a sight alien yet oddly familiar, and then Janeway remembered the ancient superstitions of Earth: the Grey Men who would come in the night on flying dinnerware to abduct naughty children, or the UFO cults that flourished before Humanity encountered extraterrans for real and found them a lot more mundane.

She rose to her feet, Chakotay and Nee'Lix following suit. "The Caretaker, I presume?"

"That is my title," he replied, making no effort to introduce himself by name. "I understand that you seek passage for your space-vessel, to a planet you designate as Earth."

"That's correct. Thank you for agreeing to see us so soon. I'm told you're a busy man."

"Your request aroused my curiosity. It took some time for my staff to find your homeworld in the data-files." Projectors arrayed across the discoid sent a tri-vid image shimmering into existence before them: a blue-green world with all-too familiar continents. The scattering of lights on the nightside showed the population were not yet concentrated in megacities, and there was no sign of the extensive changes to the Mediterranean that had occurred after the damming of the Straits of Gibraltar, but Janeway still felt a pang of yearning at the sight.

"That's Earth, all right. How long ago was this image taken?"

"According to our records the last expedition to your world arrived in your Terran Year 1937. Eight sentient biological specimens were taken for study. Autonomous aero-drones were left behind to conduct a detailed survey over the next two decades, but found little of value. No further expeditions have been authorized."

"Well _someone_ brought us here." Janeway held up a stereograph of the cube-ship. "This wouldn't be one of your raiders, by any chance?"

The Caretaker stared unblinking at the image. "This vessel is not known to the Briori."

 _'He's lying,'_ thought Janeway. It was a reckless thought when dealing with extraterrans, whose unfamiliar culture and mannerisms often led to misunderstanding. But Janeway had learned to rely on her gut instinct; it had saved her life too many times. "Yet you say the Briori have taken 'biological specimens' from Earth before. What happened to them?"

"One specimen was retained for my personal archive, the others sold on to our clients. Their fate is unknown. What others do with their property is not our concern."

"I do not understand," said TuV'k. "You have the ability to cross the entire galaxy, yet your mercenaries boast of seizing treasure and taking sentient life-forms as slaves. What possible use could they be to an advanced technological society?"

"They serve many uses," replied the Caretaker. "Clients like the Srivani and Vidiians, who have moral qualms about medical experimentation or organ-trading, find it more acceptable if practiced on species they regard as inferior. For cultural reasons the Hirogen require a constant supply of sentient prey. Unique life-forms are sought by scientific researchers and procurers for pleasure worlds alike. And there are always those who enjoy the subjugation and service of others for its own sake. Societies that have advanced beyond the day-to-day struggle for survival are easily bored and seek diversion. Thanks to the constant brigandage of the K'Zon, the collection of esoterica from far-off worlds has become what you Terrans call a 'fad' among my wealthier clients. Even we Briori are not immune to such petty distractions. Some of my people collect priceless artifacts, while others are obsessed with frivolous entertainment. I pride myself on making a virtue of my hobby, by advancing the study of Science and Culture. Allow me to show you."

The ducted fans on the hover-craft whirred, propelling him in the direction of the surrounding alcoves. Captain Janeway and her officers followed, trailed by Nee'Lix and a couple of Hirogen bodyguards breathing down their necks and scratching at their heels with clawed feet. _'Mind games'_ , thought Janeway dismissively. This was not the first dodgy character she had negotiated with in her career as a Spacefleet officer.

" _Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations_ ," said the Caretaker, gesturing at a sculpture that looked more incomprehensible than the technology on display. "A fractal maze by the sophists of Vulca, taken by the K'Zon-Pommar in the Scouring of Zentar IV. Here we have a beryllium crystal interface, one of the Lost Treasures of Abaddon. These notations are the only extant writings of the scientist-philosopher Chachiin, regretfully slain by some fool of a K'Zon during their punitive expedition against the Tara-Phen. This clay tablet is all that remains of the once powerful Malkoth race. This is the electronic brain of the God-Machine of Vaal—its confiscation caused their society to collapse into barbarism, but our psychohistorians said that would have happened anyway in a few centuries. And this device was captured from the Royal Laboratories of the Rom-Ylan Star Empire. According to legend it could cloak the user from the gaze of others."

"And does it?"

"It works too well. Once the cloaking field is activated no person or electronic sensor can see in or out, making it useless for any practical application and rather difficult to study. Nevertheless, our scientists will soon penetrate its secrets."

"Not while it's stuck in your archive they won't," muttered Nee'Lix.

The Caretaker turned a cold gaze upon him. "Perhaps you will appreciate this next item then. A reproduction of the Great Tree of Rynax in the _bonsai_ style, using a cutting taken from the original before it was sterilized."

A convulsive shiver ran through Nee'Lix's body. Janeway reached down and stroked the fur on his head.

"Save your sympathy, Captain. You should not trust these creatures. Beggars and thieves the lot of them, always lying and scheming, getting into places where they do not belong. We should have exterminated them when we scoured their world." Nee'Lix screeched something in his own language but the Caretaker was unperturbed. "I was born in a cloning tank so I have no maternal ancestor."

"I think we've seen enough," said Chakotay.

"Not quite. There is one more item I wish to show you." The discoid whirred across the hall to another alcove, this one hosting a tall transparent cylinder whose contents were illuminated as they approached. A young girl in her late teens floated inside, stark naked and unmistakably human. Blonde hair drifted around a face of delicate beauty, the eyes cornflower blue and fixed in a permanent look of terror.

"You wanted to know the fate of the biological specimens taken from your world. This female was one of the first exhibits in my archive. At the time I was quite young, a mere 153 of your Terran years, so I admit I lacked experience in the subjugation of sentients. I tried to enforce compliance via pain stimulation and pleasure addiction, but the specimen proved a disappointment. She attempted self-termination and I was required to preserve her existence in this suspended-animation tank. It is just as well, as your species is so short-lived."

"She's... still alive?" gasped Janeway.

"Her biological functions are being maintained. Suspended animation preserves the body, but the isolation from physical sensation is more than most sentient beings can cope with. She has been inside that tank for eighty of your Earth years and would have long since succumbed to insanity. And now down to business," he continued without pause. "Travel though the Universal Portal Network is expensive; the energy requirements for a journey across the entire galaxy, considerable. Do you have means of payment?"

Janeway felt Nee'Lix tugging on her arm and wrenched her gaze from the girl in the tank. She looked around for support. Chakotay was still transfixed in horror. TuV'k was facing down their Hirogen escort who were leaning close, teeth bared in unmasked hunger. Across the hall First Major Cullah watched her reaction with a smirk that reminded her of that lecherous swine Qu on the _Valkyrie_ all those years ago. She pulled herself together with a visible effort. "Of course we do. _Voyager_ is not a trading vessel but we have gold, tungsten, high-grade steel, lead-pressed uranium..."

"Gold is useful in electrical conduction, but the adoption of the electronic monetary system has reduced its value as currency. Steel and tungsten have long since been superseded by molecular-bonded alloys such as Tritanium and Duranium, while nuclear fusion has greatly reduced our need for fissionable material."

_'Well something we have has got your attention, or we wouldn't be here.'_

"Anti-matter," said Janeway. Spacefleet had seized every gram they could get their hands on during the Asteroid Resettlement, and _Voyager_ had an electromagnetic field-trap in Cargo Bay One holding enough refined contraterrene to power a megacity. She was loath to surrender it now the Jovians had taken over the asteroid mines; it would be badly needed until an alternate source could be found. But she had no illusion their passage back would be cheap.

The Caretaker flinched. "I trust you are following the safety procedures set out under the GY74656 Interstellar Transport Agreement (Revised)?"

"I've no idea. We haven't blown ourselves to spacedust, if that's what you mean. You're welcome to visit _Voyager_ and examine our confinement system yourself."

"I shall pass on your invitation," he said dryly. "As it happens, I have another form of payment in mind. A modest one, well within your means."

"That's very generous of you," said Janeway, waiting for the punchline.

"I require another sentient biological specimen like this one," said the Caretaker. "Female, Terran, of a fertile age. You have several among your crew, I understand."

Chakotay spoke for all of them. "Eat radioactive slag!"

"It would be unwise to refuse my offer."

"You know, I'm really easy to get along with most of the time," said Janeway in an overly calm tone, "but I don't like bullies, I don't like threats, and I don't like you. We'll take our business elsewhere."

"There is no-one else who can return you to your homeworld," said the Caretaker. "Perhaps you could buy passage on a vessel equipped with a spacewarp drive, but how far would they take you? Do you intend to cross the entire galaxy that way, a crew of itinerants going from one starship or star system to the next? Refugees and vagrants soon outlive their welcome. How long before you are sold to the Vidiians for your organs, or hunted down for sport by my Hirogen? How long before circumstances break up your crew and they come to grief in a hundred different ways?"

"Then we will take this to a higher authority."

"I am the Caretaker of the Array. I control all passage through the black star portal. There is no higher authority."

"Really? You refer to yourself as the Caretaker. That implies you're caring for that portal on behalf of someone else."

The Caretaker's eyes narrowed, slowly like those of a cat. "An error in translation. This language we are using is imprecise. I will have an answer from you, Captain Janeway."

Janeway placed her hands on her hips, feeling the holster unlock under her palm.

"I'll be precise then. The answer is no."

She drew her pistol and fired in a single fluid movement. Flame spurted from the recoil ports, holding the barrel on target despite the massive kick of the .51 caliber bullet. A large hole appeared in the suspended-animation tank and a shower of glutinous liquid sprayed across the floor, freshly tinged with red. Hirogen and K'Zon alike leapt to their feet, their bodyguards waving guns and trying to figure out whether to shoot Janeway or each other.

"Vandals!" screeched the Caretaker, the discoid bearing him up to the vaulted apex of the hall. "You shall pay for that!" His voice switched to a loudcaster. " _Guards, I want this accursed female and her entire crew thrown off the Array! Their trading rights are hereby rescinded!"_

"Looks like I'll be the one scrubbing those waste vents." Janeway holstered her pistol and turned to the others, ignoring what looked like several handheld artillery pieces being brandished in her direction. "Gentlemen, let's get the Manhattan Crater out of here."

"Agreed," said TuV'k. He and Chakotay flanked the captain, and with Nee'Lix following they walked straight to the exit, avoiding eye contact with the agitated mercenaries. They had just reached the maglevator when the Hirogen Alpha spoke, causing the entire hall to fall silent.

"My name is Karr D'knn. You are worthy prey, Captain Janeway. I shall hunt you down, and your bones will adorn the bulkhead of my ship."

"You're welcome to try," was Janeway's retort. "There's room for another shipbuilder plate in my wardroom."

TO BE CONTINUED


	3. Conclusion of a Three-Part Serial.

Synopsis: The United Nations Rocketship VOYAGER under the command of CAPTAIN JANEWAY was returning to Earth when it was caught in the gravitation beam of a vast cube-shaped spacecraft that carried them off to the other side of the galaxy! Whilst VOYAGER was able to break free, their losses forced CAPTAIN JANEWAY to form an alliance with renegade Spacefleet officer CHAKOTAY and his crew of Maquis rebels. Seeking a way home, they set course for THE ARRAY, a space station orbiting a black star that is the portal for an intergalactic transport network controlled by THE CARETAKER, whose space pirates use it to steal slaves and technology from throughout the galaxy. THE CARETAKER demands a shocking price for allowing VOYAGER to return to Earth: a female member of their crew for his own personal archive!

**Chapter X: THE NEEDS OF THE MANY**

The next few hours were the longest of Captain Janeway's life. The worst moment had been when they returned to the landing dome to find the shuttleboat missing, Tom Paris having taken it for a joyride. Janeway suspected that something illicit was involved, but on discovering that B'Elanna Torres and Seska Pamyatnykh were also on board she had ordered him to return the girls to _Voyager_ at once while the Aeroshuttle was sent to pick them up instead.

The rest of their shipmates had arrived under escort by Pralor robots, several on stretchers thanks to food poisoning or excessive alcohol consumption. Ensign Kim had been bundled off to a decontamination ward after picking up a disease that made his skin glow, and Lon Suder had been arrested due to an altercation in a bar, but her fear that the Caretaker might hold them hostage had been averted when the overly-logical androids had removed them from the Array as well.

They had remained at General Quarters until it was evident the Hirogen and K'Zon warships prowling nearby had no intention of attacking. Guessing that the Caretaker did not want a conflict erupting so close to the Array, Janeway had _Voyager_ moved to a geostationary position a few hundred feet above his castle before standing down half the crew so they could get some sleep. Let the Caretaker sweat about all that contraterrene they were carrying.

But it was Janeway's own dreams that were disturbing, as often happened when she had gone too long without sleep. She saw the girl floating in the suspended-animation tank but this time it was Eve from the _Valkyrie_ , her body burnt and blackened yet her eyes open and accusing. Every alcove held someone she knew: Tu'Vix, Cavit, Fitzgerald, Star'Di, Lang, Mbuangi, Ziegler, Horvat, Tran, Jetal, Ballard, Darwin and Li—all the men and women who had died due to her actions, while Qu's mad taunting echoed around the Caretaker's hall: _"But isn't that why they made you captain? To handle those really tough decisions? My, my; I guess now we get to find out whether the pants really fit!"_

When the harsh blare of the intercraft woke her up, she was grateful.

_"Radio Room to Captain Janeway."_

The captain groped for the handset, locating it by touch in the darkened capsule. "Janeway here."

_"Tech Lieutenant Nicoletti, ma'am. We were able to find only two starships large enough to transport Voyager in its entirety. A generation ship for a species called the Varro, and a city-ship of the Voth. Both refuse to answer our hails. The Caretaker is broadcasting a message saying that any vessel that aids us will be denied passage through the portal network and protection from the K'Zon or Hirogen."_

"Thank you, Sparks. Tell the xenolinguists they can stand down." She clicked off the intercraft. What now? Form an alliance with one of the K'Zon sects, then storm the castle and strongarm the Caretaker into sending them home? But the Briori would be expecting treachery from that quarter; that was why they kept the Hirogen on hand and the sects at each other's throats. And how many innocents would die if it came to a shoot-out on the Array?

She had no desire to return to her dreams, so Janeway opened her sleeping capsule, grabbed a null-gee rail and propelled herself out the door and down the passageway. It was nighttime on _Voyager_ , an artificial distinction in the darkness of Space that was necessary for psychological reasons. Though watch stations were still manned, red filters had been placed over the light-tubes and the crew talked in whispers. But the noise of the ship continued unabated: humming busbars and clicking relays, gurgling pipes and bubbling algae tanks, the chug-chug of pumps and the whirr and clank of robotic machinery. If you wanted silence on a spaceship, you suited-up and went for a walk on the hull.

Janeway did not want silence. It was a bad time to be alone with her thoughts. As usual at such times she found herself heading for the Air Garden, their oasis in a desert of metal. When the crew tired of grey bulkheads or the artificial pleasures of the Illusionarium, they visited the hydroponics garden to gaze upon growing things and hash over their troubles with the ship's gardener. Tech Lieutenant Hansen might rule the astrodome as her private domain, but Agritech Keshari did nothing to discourage visitors. She said talking helped the plants grow.

Janeway floated into the antechamber and made sure to dog the hatch behind her before opening the interior door. A blast of warm moist air enveloped her, bringing memories of humid summers back home in Indiana. She took in the greenery arrayed around the glowing suntubes, some familiar from the farm-factories of her childhood, others exotic hybrids from Venus or the top-secret laboratories of the Lysenko Institute. Condensation drifted through the garden in a gentle mist, drawn toward the languidly-rotating fans that took oxygen from the room and replaced it with carbon dioxide exhaled by the crew.

"Those monkeys are stealing my mangoes!" cried a girl's voice.

_'Monkeys?'_ Janeway pushed through the foliage, moving carefully so as not to damage the plants.

"But the mangoes didn't belong to him!" Nee'Lix's voice now.

"Well Brahmadatta was a king. For a man with that power, to see something is to own it."

"I've known people like that." Nee'Lix was gripping the treillage with his prehensile tail leaving his paws free to pick tomatoes, placing them into an elastic string bag that was strapped to his chest. Above him floated a dusky bare-footed waif in a blue coverall and matching turban. She was sliding a probe into a rack of hydroponic trays, the results displayed on the EC meter strapped to her slim wrist.

"King Brahmadatta ordered his archers to surround the mango tree and shoot the monkeys as soon as it became light enough to see," said the young Indian girl. "The monkeys knew the dawn would bring their doom, for there was no tree close enough for them to escape to."

_'I know this tale'_ , thought Janeway. It was in one of the books displayed in her wardroom.

"But the chief of the monkeys was strong and bold." Keshari plucked a stray leaf from Nee'Lix's whiskers, making him purr just like a Terran cat. "He found a long reed, and tied one end to his ankle and the other to the tallest branch of the mango tree. Then he leapt across the river to a tree on the opposite bank. But the reed was not quite long enough and he was barely able to grab hold of the closest tree branch. So the chief bade his monkeys to run across the reed and over his back to get to safety. This they did, but the last monkey to cross jumped onto his back too hard and broke it. The chief of the monkeys fell to the ground, and as he lay there, broken and dying, King Brahmadatta approached him. "You made your body a bridge for others to cross," said the king. "Why did you give your life for theirs?" And the chief replied__"

_"ARRRGGGHHH!"_

Keshari and Nee'Lix turned in alarm to see their captain enmeshed in the tendrils of a large purplish plant. It took them some time to untangle Janeway and remove the myriad barbs that were stuck in her hair and clothing.

"I didn't know it was prehensile, Keshari. I got too close and it _grabbed_ me!"

"Sorry, Captain. Those Soviet _triffidus_ can be quite aggressive. They were designed to compete with native plant life on Venus, so they have high energy requirements. You don't get that from photosynthesis alone."

"A carnivorous plant!" exclaimed Nee'Lix. "Is it dangerous?" After a moment of thought he added, "Is it good to eat?"

"They're used to much smaller prey," said Keshari. "Tree snakes and small birds, for the most part." She reconnected a hose that had come loose in the struggle, then removed her turban and used it to soak up the droplets of water floating in the air. Sweat glistened on her bald scalp, and she wrapped the damp turban around her head again to cool it. "They're useful for pest control and CO2 conversion, but you have to keep an eye on them."

"As long as that thing doesn't pull up its roots and go prowling around my ship."

"Nee'Lix was telling me about the Great Tree of Rynax," said Keshari. "It sounds beautiful."

"So I saw," said Janeway. "Mr. Nee'Lix, when I asked to meet the Briori you didn't mention that they were the ones who invaded your homeworld. I'm sorry I put you through that."

Nee'Lix was checking his fur for stray _triffidus_ barbs and didn't answer for a while.

"Well, that's all in the past," he said eventually. "And you were a long way from home yourself..." All of a sudden he plunged his paws into his chest bag, producing a ripe tomato. A farmer of the previous century would scarcely have recognized it, swollen as it was to twice its natural size by cobalt irradiation. "Speaking of which, Keshari says you need someone to run your messdeck! I can do _wonderful_ things with vegetables, Captain! Take these tomatoes... am I saying it right? Is it pronounced 'tomayto' or 'tomahto'?"

"It's eether, I mean either... never mind. We already have a cook." Janeway had no intention of hiring Nee'Lix to take over the Commissary. These extraterrans had strange ideas of cuisine: meat from animals instead of synthetic food vats, and unprocessed fruit with the seeds still in them! Martian beef and vegetables were good for an occasional treat, but these all-natural foods were not healthy in the long run. "And this won't be a very safe place when the Caretaker decides to let his pirates off the leash. Your friend Wix'Iban has found you a berth on an Ubean freighter. We just need to find a way of slipping you off the ship when no-one's looking."

"I heard what happened on the Array," said Keshari.

"I don't know what I was thinking, trying to bargain with that kind of scoundrel. Did I seriously believe that just because a species has advanced technology, they're going to have advanced morals as well?" _'And now I've made things worse'_ , thought Janeway. If she had just stonewalled for a few months, the Caretaker might have lost interest and taken his payment in contraterrene. Now he had been humiliated in front of his men and could not afford to back down.

Keshari picked up her EC probe and went back to checking the nutrient salts. "My father was an agronomist," she said. "He wanted to feed the starving people of India. He said that science could offer salvation, a Green Revolution that would feed the world. But research takes time and people want quick solutions, so they looked to a military strongman who seized power and declared himself Khan. He offered a solution. Depopulation via germ warfare on those people he said were our enemies. It wasn't long before the whole world was our enemy."

"I remember," said Janeway. It was a Spacefleet orbital platform that had destroyed the Khan's palace in Chandigarh. Keshari was just one of the thousands of innocent casualties, slowly dying of radiation poisoning. She could have prolonged her life in a null-gee hospital, but Keshari had joined Spacefleet because she wanted to see other worlds in the time she had left.

"He said the needs of the many must outweigh the needs of the few."

"They always say things like that," muttered Nee'Lix. "Funny how the people who make these decisions are never among the few."

"Sacrifice must be voluntary," agreed Keshari. "Or it's not a sacrifice, but murder. Captain, I'd like to offer myself to this Caretaker. If he has suffering in mind for me, then I will not suffer long. The doctors say I'll be dead in eight or nine years, and then my soul will be reincarnated in a better life. It would be my gift to this crew, who have given me so much love."

"Oh _Keshari..._ ," sighed Janeway.

"NO!" shouted Nee'Lix. "Such a sweet person handed over to those... monsters! How could your friends live with themselves, knowing they had bought their passage home at the price of your freedom?"

"It's not going to happen," Janeway assured him. "There are three things to remember about being a Spacefleet captain, Mr. Nee'Lix. Always keep your coverall zipped up, go down with the ship, and never abandon a member of your crew. Speaking of which..." She zipped up her uniform, which had become somewhat disarrayed. "I'd like you to accompany me to the Hangar Deck. You've been a great help, but it's time _Voyager_ was on her way. Feel free to keep those tomatoes as a parting gift, compliments of the captain."

"But I was hoping to join your crew!" Nee'Lix cast an appealing look at Keshari. "Besides, I want to know how the story of the monkey bridge ends."

_'I know how it ends,'_ thought Janeway. _'There's only one way this can end.'_

**Chapter XI: BEYOND THE BLACK STAR**

A docking between two space-vessels of alien design is a maneuver fraught with danger, especially when the crews have itchy trigger fingers. When the rocket-propelled mooring lines shot across to the Hirogen warship and the purple flash of a brush discharge lit up the hull, only the self-enforced discipline of the spacefarer prevented both ships from blowing each other to atoms. The tension was not eased by the slow process of warping the vessels together. Peering through the armorglass viewport, Captain Janeway could see every detail of the extraterran warship exposed under their searchlights: gun barbettes, missile tubes, magnetic grapples, energy projectors to blind sensors and TV eyes, squat breaching pods poised on their launch cradles. This was a vessel made to board and storm.

_"Docking ring engaged,"_ blared the bullhorn above her head. " _Pressurizing transfer tunnel."_

Janeway pulled tight the shoulder strap of her kitbag, then spun herself round to face Chakotay. Her First Officer was floating above an autocannon that had been dismounted from a gun blister and lashed to the deckplates, its deadly cluster of barrels aimed at the air-lock hatch. His face was as unreadable as those of the oxymasked gun crew strapped in behind it. Was he glad to be rid of her? Janeway could only imagine what Spacefleet Command would say about her placing a CT-powered warship in the hands of a Maquis renegade. She would just have to hope that Chakotay still thought seizing _Voyager_ by force was too great a risk.

"I'm turning over command of the ship to you, Space Commander. Your orders are to resume course for the Solar System and hand over _Voyager_ to the Martian government, whereupon all former members of the Maquis will be released from their obligations. I've entered their pardons in the ship's log, witnessed by Tech Lieutenant TuV'k."

Chakotay opened his mouth as if to reply, then tightened his jaw and gave a curt nod. On impulse she let go of the null-gee cable to reach over and grip his shoulders.

"I'm placing my crew in your hands, Chakotay. Get them home."

_"Synthetic atmosphere optimum. Pressure optimum. With your permission, ma'am."_

"Do it." She pushed hard on Chakotay's shoulders, forcing herself back into the air-lock. The inner hatch sealed and the armored outer hatch swung aside to show an accordion tube spanning the gap between the two vessels. As she drifted through the transfer tunnel, Janeway tried not to think about how thin the material was between her and the vacuum of Space, or what would happen if either vessel started their engines while she was still inside.

At the far end of the tunnel, an oversized docking ring had clamped around the Hirogen air-lock with powerful electromagnets, an inflatable gasket of silicone-rubber expanding to form an atmospheric seal despite its extraterran design. As Janeway approached the hatch unscrewed and withdrew inside the vessel like a huge plug. The humid atmosphere of an alien world enveloped her, and as she floated into the air-lock she was slammed to the deck, caught in the pull of that artificial gravity they used. Sharp talons seized her arms and dragged her painfully upright.

"I should not have given you my name," the Hirogen Alpha snarled in her face. His breath reeked of raw meat and fresh blood. "A worthy prey would never have surrendered."

"What makes you think I have?" asked Janeway.

There was a muffled _clunk_ as _Voyager_ 's transfer tunnel detached from the hull.

"Besides that..."

She tried not to flinch as the Hirogen guards tore off her rank insignia and sliced open every pocket to search for weapons or suicide pills. The kitbag was ripped from her grasp and looted. Discovering her thermos, the Alpha twisted off the cap and guzzled the contents in just a few gulps.

_'I hope you choke!'_ thought Janeway, as she watched the last coffee in 70,000 light-years vanish before her eyes.

"Warrior's drink!" roared the Alpha, thrashing his tail in approval.

They frog-marched Janeway down corridors lined with rib-like arches that she belatedly realized _were_ ribs—the osseous matter of once-mighty leviathans, stripped of flesh and displayed as grim trophies, the hunts that placed them there depicted on the bone in exquisite scrimshaw. Skulls stared through empty eye sockets and glowlights cast a lustrous gleam on racked weapons ranging from flint-headed spears to portable atom bombs. And there were things that surprised her. Shrines to the trinkets of children, and murals of an alien world depicted with the nostalgia of exile: desert flowers around an obsidian monolith, sunsets made radiant by volcanic ash, iridescent eyes peering through a veil of filigreed gold. Despite her fear Janeway kept her thoughts focused, memorizing the twists and turns of the warship's construction. Hope died when she was dragged into a torpedo room to find the Caretaker hovering there like an expectant vulture.

"If you want to put me on display in your banquet hall, you might let me fix my hair first."

"It appears you are to be spared that fate." The Caretaker gestured to where the Hirogen were hooking up a crude life support system in an autonomous cargo rocket. The loading hatches were splayed open, showing a space as inviting and roomy as a coffin. "Your act of self-sacrifice has proven an annoyance, Captain Janeway. I had planned to deliver _Voyager_ to the beings who brought you here, while retaining a specimen from your crew for my own archive. Unfortunately they have no interest in your ship, only its captain. They have learned of our arrangement and insist that you be handed over. Refusal would be... unwise."

"So, you have a higher authority after all."

The Caretaker gave an irritated hiss. "Just as these Hirogen must be placated with live prey, so must... certain clients whose identity is best kept secret. They are the source of our graviton devices, and in payment I provide them with sentient specimens and advanced technology plundered by my mercenaries." His cold eyes turned to the Hirogen guards. "Wait until _Voyager_ has entered the portal network before launching her into the black star. I want no last-minute interference from her crew."

"How is crushing me down to my component atoms going to make your clients happy?" asked Janeway.

"The workings of the black star portal are beyond your comprehension."

"Beyond yours too, I'll bet."

The Caretaker's lipless mouth compressed to a thin line. He made a curt gesture to his guards and intense agony shot through Janeway's body, her legs buckled and she fell to the deck. When the fog cleared from her mind, she was inside the cargo rocket and the hatches were being welded shut with an atomic lance, the Caretaker staring at her through the inspection window with the detached interest of a scientist studying the contents of a petri dish.

"A terrible fate awaits you. You may well regret not choosing to die alongside your crew."

Janeway's voice was calm and steady. "And the monkey chief said to King Brahmadatta: I am their chief and their guide; I lived with them in this tree and I loved them. I do not suffer in leaving this world for I have gained my subjects' freedom. And if my death may be a lesson to you, then I am more than happy. It is not your sword that makes you a king; it is love alone."

"What are you ranting about, Terran?"

"Something beyond your comprehension, 'Caretaker'."

The rocket slid into the launch tube plunging Janeway into darkness. She felt bile rise in her throat and bit her lip to distract herself from the nausea; the old spacer trick for dealing with weightlessness and then Janeway realized she WAS weightless, floating free in the void outside the spaceship! She gasped for air, struggled against her claustrophobic prison, her eyes casting desperately for something to focus on: a star, an asteroid, a flaw in the armorglass window but there was nothing _an infinity of nothingness for ever and ever exposed to the naked Universe in all its terror close your eyes but it makes no difference in the blackness of Space so breathe-breathe-breathe-in-out, in-and-out sloooowly innn-and-ouuut reMEMber what PEACE there MAY be in Silence reMEMber what PEACE there MAY be in Silence remember what peace there may be in silence remember what peace..._

Her breath caught as something finally captured her gaze, a mere speck against the blackness but those Spacefleet navigation lights were unmistakable. The Hirogen had launched her too soon— _Voyager_ hadn't entered the portal after all! The crew kept a constant meteorite watch... surely they had picked her up on radar? But something was wrong; the navigation lights should be flashing blue and green but they were frozen in place, slowly changing to a blurred red afterimage which faded from existence before her horrified eyes.

"No-no-no-no-NO!" Janeway hammered her fists again and again against the inspection window, at first in anger and then in a futile attempt to shatter the armorglass; better a quick death in the vacuum of Space than whatever fate the Caretaker had in mind but there was no room to deliver an effective blow because the rocket was shrinking and her entire body was being squeezed with iron clamps a blinding pain like hot needles driving into her skull! Her vision blurred and everything was turning red...

Afterwards Janeway could not be sure what she witnessed inside the black star portal and what had been the phantasmagoria of space madness. Stars and nebulae and entire galaxies reduced to streaks of light in nameless colors, centuries that passed in an eyeblink, the Universe fractured into divergent paths of possibility. She stood alone on a burning Bridge, a Hirogen warship filling the telescreens in the seconds before impact. She cradled a child to her breast, watching Chakotay plow the earth under the light of an alien sun. She was plunging to her death over a vast industrial city, until the ground opened beneath her and she fell screaming into a cyclopean Hades. And it was at that moment that Janeway heard the mocking taunt of Captain Qu as clear as if he was standing right behind her, in the place where insanity lurks in every spacer. _"It's not very safe, out here in Outer Space. It can be wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid."_

**Chapter XII: THE PSIBORG COLLECTIVE**

Captain Janeway awoke to find herself still trapped inside the cargo rocket, her head throbbing and her limbs like lead weights. Gravity held her within its grasp again, and through the window she could see a surprisingly mundane deckhead lined with pipes and glowing tubules of tritium gas. She recalled a white light at the end of a tunnel of stars, but this was definitely no afterlife. There had been something rushing towards her... a black monolith in the blinding glare until it was close enough to make out what looked like a vast city before a hatchway had opened like a giant iris and drew her inside... the cube-ship! It had to be!

"HELLO! IS ANYONE THERE?" Janeway shouted, only to start coughing and gasping in the stagnant air. She rapped on the metal of her prison and winced as a stabbing pain shot through her knuckles, raw and bleeding from her earlier efforts. She kept knocking regardless; it was either escape or die. "I'M TRAPPED! GET ME OUT OF HERE!" 

Some... _thing_ entered her field of view, peering through the inspection window at her. For a moment she thought it was the Caretaker but this Briori was very different, the grey skin turned a pallid white and the body modified with artificial prosthetics. Instead of a hover-craft he stood on a spidery cluster of metallic legs; instead of waldo gloves a mane of varicolored wires emerged from the back of his skull and plugged into his artificial limbs like literal nerves of steel.

Janeway craned her head and saw two more figures staring down at her, both radically different in appearance. One was a large crustacean, the thorax covered by a transparent casing beneath which she could see organs pulsating with the aid of tiny mechanical pumps and a micratomic engine for a heart. The third figure might well have been human: a six-foot Adonis with handsome features, encased in a metallic silver garment that clung to his well-muscled body like a second skin, making it evident—as Janeway saw with horror—that the surgeons had rendered him genderless. The only thing that all three had in common was a copper skullcap, strikingly similar in appearance to the encephalo-adjuster caps used for the _melding-of-minds_.

The trio stepped forward in unison. While the Briori held the rocket steady with his many appendages, the others proceeded to dismantle it around her using tools attached to their prosthetic limbs. Janeway scrambled to her feet the moment she was free but they showed no interest in her, continuing to break the rocket down into components: metal, plastic, electronics—even the remaining fuel was syphoned off into bottles. Everything was placed on a robot trolley, the tools were detached and neatly racked, then the whole lot marched off down the corridor, leaving Janeway alone and somewhat nonplussed.

"Aren't you going to take me to your leader? Or at least a tour guide?"

There was no reply, so Janeway set off in the opposite direction in case they returned to dissect her as well. It made little difference as she discovered there were more of those beings wherever she went; some wired into alcoves like trophies in the Caretaker's archive, others laboring with ant-like regimentation on mysterious tasks, ignoring any attempt she made to speak to them. But her progress did not pass unobserved; there always seemed to be one of them looking in her direction every time she entered a chamber or a corridor. Back-tracking did no good, nor trying to outrun their gaze. She even tried clambering through one of the larger ventilation ducts, only to find them waiting patiently wherever she emerged. Yet she could sense no animation behind those watching eyes; neither hostility nor curiosity, not even the amoral scientific detachment of the Caretaker. It was like they were dead inside.

It was not as if the concept of _Homo Artificialis_ was unknown to her, not with Annika Hansen as a member of her crew. But the Spaceborn surgeons who modified her astrogator had sought a balance between practicality and aesthetics; the ability to live in Space with the need to interact with others. Hansen was Spaceborn, but still human and unmistakably feminine. These beings seemed emotionless, androgynous; even (to use the archaic Christian term) soulless. Some of the species she recognized from the Array: Ovion hexapods, saurian Voth, an insectile race that had only been described as The Swarm. There were anthropoids and octopods, avians and simians and gillmen, sentient plants and silicon-based life-forms and others she could not even categorize given the extensive alterations made to their bodies. _'I provide them with sentient specimens and advanced technology,'_ the Caretaker had said, and it had all ended up in this mad scientist laboratory writ large. But why had these beings tried to seize _Voyager_ in the first place? A rocketship was hardly advanced technology to a civilization with the power to stride the galaxy.

After what felt like hours of exploration Janeway felt herself starting to flag. The adrenaline rush of survival had long since passed and she had no salt tablets or Dexedrine pills to sustain her. Janeway wondered grimly if she was doomed to wander this metal labyrinth until she died of thirst or exhaustion. It was not just a spaceship but an entire city, one unlike any she had ever seen. There was organization but no apparent means of organizing: no control-rooms or supervisors, no bureaucrats or police, no signs to label or indicate direction. She saw giant protein tanks and algae farms but no mess halls, workers but no recreation areas or sleeping quarters. There was sound—steam hissing from ventilators, busbars humming with power, strange energies that crackled and coalesced within stranger machines—but not the background hubbub of conversation. At times Janeway thought she heard whispers carried on the slight breeze of the air-renovators, but wherever she turned to look she saw no-one.

It was while following such a phantasm that Janeway rounded a corner no different from a thousand others and found herself looking into open air. A vast docking bay over a mile in length, with what appeared to be model spacecraft hanging on cradles over the chasm—but Janeway had seen similar craft passing through the Array and knew they were arkships that would have dwarfed _Voyager_. Tiny mites buzzed around them: avians whose wings had been replaced with surgically-implanted jetpacks, other life-forms with prosthetic limbs attached to contra-rotating rotor blades. A shuttleboat rocketed past just a few yards away, flown not by a pilot but a living brain floating inside a transparent ovoid. Wisps of cloud drifted across the bay; the condensation formed by the breath of tens of thousands of living beings. Janeway looked up and saw a sky speckled with stars that she gradually realized were the lights of alcoves, entire levels of them, row upon row filling her field of vision. The sheer scale of it all was mind numbing.

"Who in Space are you people?" she wondered aloud.

_"We..."_

A whisper so faint, Janeway could not be sure it wasn't her imagination again.

_"We... are..."_

It was unmistakable now. The whispers came from no particular direction; they were echoes inside her mind, rising and falling in volume, a multitude of voices merging into one.

_"We... we... WE... are... are... ARE... one... one... ONE..."_

"I am Captain Kathryn Janeway!" she shouted. "I speak as a representative of the Tri-World Federation!" She spoke in Traben, then realized the voice was speaking in Terran-English. How did they know her native language? "Identify yourself!"

"WE ARE ONE." The voice spoke in her mind, loud and clear like a radio that had been tuned to the correct frequency. "WE ARE THE PSIBORG COLLECTIVE. WE ARE ONE MIND, ONE VOICE, ONE WILL. ONCE WE WERE MANY: INDIVIDUAL MINDS OF DIFFERENT SPECIES, DIFFERENT WORLDS, DIFFERENT THOUGHTS. NOW WE ARE ONE."

A psychic gestalt, thought Janeway; a so-called hive-mind. She was not 'hearing' the voice of the Psiborg Collective; they were using some kind of telepathy. She tried talking instead of shouting. "First you tried to seize my ship, then you had the Caretaker bring me here. What do you want with me?"

They had no trouble hearing her because the answer came right back. "WE GATHER SPECIMENS OF SENTIENT RACES FROM THROUGHOUT THE GALAXY TO JOIN THE COLLECTIVE. WE ACT THROUGH THE ONE YOU KNOW AS THE CARETAKER TO CONCEAL OUR INVOLVEMENT, BUT THE METHODS EMPLOYED BY HIS MERCENARIES ARE INEFFICIENT. WE CHOSE TO ACT DIRECTLY TO SECURE A SPACEFLEET CAPTAIN, ONE WHO IS AUTHORISED TO SPEAK AS A REPRESENTATIVE OF YOUR TRI-WORLD FEDERATION."

"If you just wanted to make First Contact you could have said so from the start, instead of dragging us across the entire Milky Way!"

"YOUR ARCHAIC THOUGHT PROCESSES RESIST ASSIMILATION INTO THE COLLECTIVE WILL. KNOWLEDGE OF THE COLLECTIVE CREATES FEAR. FEAR BECOMES RESISTANCE. IN THE PAST WE WERE FORCED TO SEEK REFUGE IN DEEP SPACE, HIDING FROM THOSE WHO WOULD DESTROY US. WE HAVE REFINED OUR TECHNOLOGY AND INCREASED OUR NUMBERS OVER THE CENTURIES. SOON WE SHALL COMMENCE THE ASSIMILATION OF EVERY SPECIES IN THE GALAXY INTO A SINGLE OVERMIND. THERE WILL BE NO MORE WAR, NO MORE CONFLICT, NO MORE INEQUALITY. WE SHALL UPLIFT YOU TO A HIGHER STATE OF EXISTENCE."

Janeway saw an image in her mind, as real as any tri-vid: the giant cube-ships of the Psiborg Collective hovering effortlessly over the megacities of Earth. The reactions of the humans below: panic, fear and awe building to a crescendo until—at a time calculated for maximum psychological impact—she would speak to the world as the voice of the Collective. A speech of such wisdom and insight that any counter-argument was futile, any resistance inconceivable. All Humanity would join together in a _melding-of-minds_ that would spread across the Solar System and eventually the entire galaxy. Many would die in the process but their deaths were irrelevant as their minds would live forever in the Overmind, whose nature was as inconceivable to the Collective now as her form would have been to the single-celled organisms from which she had evolved.

"YOUR SOLAR SYSTEM IS ISOLATED FROM THE REST OF THE GALAXY; THE FIRST STAGE OF OUR PLAN CAN PROCEED THERE UNOBSERVED. EARTH IS OVERPOPULATED YET HIGHLY INDUSTRIALISED; IT SHALL PROVIDE THE BIOLOGICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL MATERIAL REQUIRED FOR OUR ARMY OF ASSIMILATION. YOUR MIND HAS KNOWLEDGE OF EARTH'S DEFENCES, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ITS INHABITANTS. YOU SHALL BECOME ONE WITH THE COLLECTIVE AND THAT KNOWLEDGE SHALL BE OURS."

Janeway shook her head, as much to drive the images from her mind as in negation. "No...," she gasped, then much louder: "No! I refuse!"

"IRRELEVANT. YOU WILL ADAPT TO SERVICE US. YOU MUST COMPLY."

"That's what Qu said, and he was nuts!"

The hellish glare of coal-red eyes lit up the nearest alcove. Restraints snapped open, wires reeled back into sockets, umbilical cords disconnected with explosive force, filling the corridor with vaporizing steam as a nightmarish parody of a Hirogen hunter stepped from the alcove: photocells for eyes, armor grafted onto skin, claws replaced by pincers, the tail a metallic coil. Janeway turned to run and found her escape blocked by an Ovion whose six-legged bulk filled the corridor. A Briori rode on its back like an ancient hag, the control wires from its skull plugged into the hexapod's spine. Cradled in his fragile arms was a copper skullcap that looked a perfect fit for a human head.

"YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE."

Without hesitation Janeway swung a leg over the railing to throw herself into the chasm, only to feel cold pincers snap shut around her ankle. She kicked and felt ligaments tear in an unyielding grip, not the strength of mere muscles but of servo-mechanisms powered by atomic energy—Janeway knew her ankle would give way before the Psiborg would. She lashed out with her fists aiming for photocells, control wires, anything she could reach. Her arms were pinioned, her head seized in a vice-like grip so she couldn't even flinch as she heard the shriek of a powered cutting tool. Something soft brushed past her cheek, and despite her terror Janeway could not help feeling incredulous as she saw auburn strands falling onto the deckplates.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me... you're cutting off my _hair?_ You... Venerian swamp-rats!"

"YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE."

"I heard you the first time!"

"RESISTANCE IS FUTILE..." the voice of the Collective continued unabated, seeming to drill right inside her skull. "RESISTANCE IS FUTILE... RESISTANCE IS FUTILE... RESISTANCE IS FUTILE... ("Captain...") RESISTANCE IS FUTILE... ("Captain Janeway...") RESISTANCE IS FUTILE... ("Captain, can you hear my thoughts?") INTRUSION... ("My thoughts to your thoughts...") UNAUTHORISED VESSEL EXITING PORTAL 4-2-4 GRID 1-1-6... ACTIVATE GRAVITY TRACTION BEAM... SUBJUGATE... ASSIMILATE..."

A thunderclap like a bolt of the Olympians echoed throughout the docking bay as a vast cyclopean iris began to open in the hull. Janeway felt her ears pop and a rush of air tugging on her body, heard the familiar _whoosh_ of decompression as the clouds were whipped away and the airborne Psiborgs scattered, racing to land before the air vanished from under their 'copter blades. The Ovion and its macabre rider lumbered through a doorway that sealed shut behind them but the Hirogen made no effort to release her. Liquid gel flowed across its snout to seal the mouth and nostrils, twin tubules erupted from an air-tank on its back and plunged vampire-like into the Hirogen's neck.

Resisting the instinctive urge to hold her breath, Janeway took rapid gulps of air to saturate her blood with oxygen, her hyperventilation aided by the sight of the silver rocketship plunging through the dilating iris. _Voyager_ was not waiting to be dragged in by the traction beam but was coming in with thrusters blazing. No sight had inspired such joy and terror in her at the same time.

("Captain Janeway...") came TuV'k's voice again in her mind, stronger than the thousand voices of the Collective. ("Give us your location...")

"800 yards port on your axis of thrust!" Janeway shouted against the whirlwind rushing out into the void, though she knew her Psionics Officer was not listening to her verbally. "Declination... minus fifteen! Inhabitants hostile!"

("Seen") was the reply, then the calmly-stated command: ("Commence firing.")

Lines of crimson death shot from the gun blisters like the colored rays of science-fiction. The fragmentation shells would have barely scratched the double-armored hull of a rocketship—they were designed to protect _Voyager_ when landed on a planet's surface, or as a last-ditch defense against missiles. But inside the cube-ship the rapid-fire guns wrecked bloody devastation. Autoloaders slammed a relentless stream of ammunition into the hot breeches, powered traverse mechanisms smoothly tracked their targets, electro-mechanical predictors linked to gunlaying radar enabled deadly accuracy. A hail of cannisters ripple-fired from the ejector tubes and burst to form a billowing smokescreen and clouds of radar-reflecting 'window', and as armed figures in dirigible space armor spilled from the air-locks all Janeway could think was: _'So much for a peaceful First Contact!'_

Her legs were yanked out from beneath her, Janeway's face smashing against the deckplates as she was dragged into the labyrinthian interior of the cube-ship. She clutched a floor grating in a death grip but found herself gasping for breath; there was an intense pain in her ears that almost drowned the nightmare howl of escaping air. A Psiborg bent over her, guiding the whirling blades of a circular saw towards her fingers. "RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!" warned the Collective. "YOU WILL__" and then an atom bomb exploded.

It was only a micratomic grenade but the blast wave knocked the Psiborgs down like skittles even with the fading air pressure. Janeway turned her face from the heat and tucked her hands beneath her body, instinctively adopting the Duck & Cover position drilled into every schoolchild. When she looked up again everything had turned red, but that was because someone was shoving her head-first into a decompression shelter-balloon.

"Oh no, you don't!" Janeway protested. "I want a gun and space armor!"

"There's no time!" shouted B'Elanna, planting a magheel against the captain's behind and booting her inside. She fumbled with the clumsy pincers of her space armor to seal the gasket, then reeled out the tow rope, looking around for help. Sergeant VanBuskirk was swinging a rescue axe into the Hirogen Psiborg, the tungsten-carbide blade smashing metal and bone like glass. Lon Suder crouched beside him firing carefully-aimed shots with his rifle. Kurt Bendara and a Spacefleet ensign she knew only as Bennet hovered over the docking bay in their jetpacks, shooting a stream of explosive bullets directly upward at an unseen target. The surrounding alcoves and corridors were being mopped up by a scratch squad of UN space marines, Maquis rebels and Spacefleet personnel. As she watched a door dilated to reveal a half-dozen Psiborgs clustered around a semi-portable energy projector; its nucleo-electric power pack, liquid-helium cooling coils and radiation-proof gunshield a stark contrast to the handheld rayguns of space western tri-vids. Before they could fire the cumbersome weapon, Corporal Rico had turned his atomic burner on them and the door deliquesced into a molten slurry along with everything behind it.

"The captain's secure! Someone give me a hand here!"

Michael Hogan activated his jetpack and flew across to her. Taking care to avoid the red-hot venturi and radiator fins, B'Elanna clipped the tow rope to his space armor, then grabbed a handle on the shelter-balloon and keyed her own thrusters. Together they lifted Captain Janeway over the smoldering wreckage, and B'Elanna started to breathe easier until she looked out into the docking bay and saw what awaited them.

_Voyager_ was at the epicenter of a swirling hurricane of airborne Psiborgs. The autocannons were spraying shells in wild random bursts, unable to track the multitude of moving targets. Gravity traction beams and energy projectors drilled visible paths through the smoke and radioactive ash. A dirigible torpedo blasted from its tube and an eye-searing flash sent everything dark as her helmet glass polarized with the rad-snoopers crackling in mad chorus. When her vision returned, B'Elanna could see _Voyager_ 's thruster rings flaring as the helmsman struggled to skew-flip the thousand-foot rocketship to face the entry iris, only for another traction beam to latch on as the Collective repaired or replaced whatever damage had been inflicted.

"You're supposed to be the smart one," said Hogan. "Any ideas?"

B'Elanna shook her helmet. If she was an engineer in a space opera, she'd babble something technical about running a feedback pulse through a transmission dish to overload their collective psi-brains, but right now she couldn't think of anything that would actually work.

Rico unslung his bazooka and loaded an A-rocket. "Well, we have to clear those gnats away if we want to get back."

"NO!" shouted B'Elanna. " _Voyager_ is surrounded by an electromagnetic field to keep out cosmic radiation! If you detonate an atom bomb within that field, it traps and concentrates the radiation inside. It'll irradiate us as we fly through it!"

The space marine looked unimpressed, though that might have been due to his prescribed ration of Benzedrine Sulfate. "So it's a choice between dying now, or dying of cancer in a few decades. Do you want to live forever?"

"No thanks," came Janeway's voice—she must have found the radio in the shelter-balloon's survival kit. "I've already had that offer today."

"Atomics won't be much use," said VanBuskirk. "There's no air left to create a pressure wave. If you want to shoot something, Rico, take out the hydraulics of that entry iris before they shut us in here."

Rico leaned out over the railing with the bazooka, making sure to point the venturi where no-one would be hit by the backblast. He squeezed one trigger to lock on the target, the second to launch, ducking behind cover as a false dawn lit up the docking bay, followed by a hailstorm of debris that noticeably thinned the swarm of flying Psiborgs.

VanBuskirk used his formidable jaw to press down the chin-switch for the all-hands circuit. "All right you apes, stand by to jump! Durst, set a micratomic demolition charge on a twenty-second timer. Torres and Hogan, in the center with the captain; I want 360-degree protection around them. Put your Y-racks on automatic, dispersal pattern Sierra. Corporal Rico and I will take up the rear. Any questions?"

"What's an 'ape', Sarge?"

"An extinct animal—like you all will be if you don't watch your six, high _and_ low. Remember we're fighting in three dimensions. Is everyone ready?"

They answered with a war cry that would have sounded impressive if their voices weren't so squeaky from the oxy-helium mix. For the tenth time, B'Elanna checked her tommy gun was loaded and the trigger guard folded back so her pincers could engage the trigger. She knew she should object to being downgraded to baggage hauler but remained guiltily silent. She had volunteered for this caper on the spur of the moment, and the men had only let her come because she was supposed to be one of the legendary women warriors of Venus. But she felt as terrified now as when her mother first pressed a scimitar into her trembling hands. She tried to think of an inspiring prayer, something from Psalm 23:4, but she forgot the words halfway and ended up mumbling a distorted version of Ezekiel 25:17 instead.

VanBuskirk stepped to the edge of the walkway. "Roughnecks and rockriders, launch on my mark! One-two-LAUNCH!"

B'Elanna hit her firing stud a fraction too late, nearly yanking her arm off as Hogan shot into the air with the shelter-balloon trailing behind on its tow rope. She could hear Janeway cursing them over the radio then she was too busy to care as Psiborg were flying at them from every direction, heedless of bullets and bomblets and the hellfire of nuclear-powered flamethrowers. She saw Bennet die when a shuttleboat kamikazed into him, Durst get his face sliced off by a grotesque horror, Suder shot in the back by a Psiborg he thought he had killed. The worst thing was it all happened in silence, with only the hiss of air-tanks and the panicked sound of her breathing.

Their guns were firing in support, bright-red droplets drifting languidly towards them until they were suddenly shooting past her helmet, far too close and impossibly fast. Stray shrapnel bounced off her tungsten-alloy space armor and B'Elanna hugged the shelter-balloon close, knowing a single shard puncturing the skin could doom its occupant. Her rad-snooper crackled in warning; someone was shooting at her but she was moving too fast and the energy beam was diffused by smoke and distance. The crackling stopped as they flew through _Voyager_ 's electromagnetic field and then the hull was coming up and she fired the jets to cushion her landing, stumbling forward until her magheel boots locked on. B'Elanna turned to see the walkway they had launched from erupt in a noiseless fireball and realized to her shock that only twenty seconds had passed.

_Voyager_ was no sanctuary. Kamikazes had followed in behind them where the guns could not fire and were now slamming into gun blisters and torpedo hatches, geysers of exploding rocket fuel lighting up the hull. B'Elanna and Hogan dragged the shelter-balloon to the nearest air-lock, then Hogan unclipped the tow rope and threw it to B'Elanna. He hit the thrusters and leapt across the hull in a huge bound, a sheet of white flame shooting fifty feet from his burner. B'Elanna clipped the rope to her armor and then hammered on the air-lock hatch. "Open up, d**n you!"

The hatch remained firmly shut and she couldn't see anyone through the viewport. The locking handle that had been built to withstand the impact of a meteorite had been torn clean off. B'Elanna keyed her chin-switch. "Torres to Control, open Docking Port Bravo!"

A blast of static was her only response, whether due to enemy jamming or radiation interference she had no idea. The next closest air-lock was two hundred feet along the dorsal spine but with the guns knocked out the Psiborg were now swarming everywhere, the others falling back on her position in an ever-shrinking circle, their burners scorching nightmare shadows into the hull. B'Elanna wished she'd kept her mouth shut about using A-bombs—she no longer cared about radiation poisoning, she just wanted to live through the next few minutes. She was an engineer not an Amazon, no matter what her mother thought...

_'Well if you're an engineer, get that hatch open!'_

B'Elanna yanked a tri-meter from her bandoleer and powered up its fluoroscope. The ghostly X-Ray image kept flickering from stray bursts of radiation, but she could still make out the locking latches—all undamaged, praise the Lord! She drew a power-wrench from her pistol holster and used it to detach the electromagnets from the docking ring. Hooking their power cables up to a micratomic battery, B'Elanna clamped them around the rim of the hatch mounting where the fluoroscope had shown the latches were, then pushed hard on the hatch.

It swung open with ease just as the hatchway became very crowded. Two marines were supporting a Maquis she recognized as Chell—his face was blue from cyanosis and hull-sealant had been sprayed over punctures in his space armor. Ayala was giving them covering fire. Summing up the situation at a glance, he yanked the D-ring to detach his jetpack and Y-rack discharger, threw aside his rifle and bundled Chell and the shelter-balloon inside. The others followed suit with unseemly haste, half-a-dozen people crammed into an air-lock that was only designed to fit two in full space armor. B'Elanna's helmet was jammed against Ayala's so she could hear him even without the radio working. _"Close the hatch!"_ he was shouting. _"We can't open the inner door until the outer hatch is shut!"_

B'Elanna groped for the red-painted handle, clasped it in her pincers and turned. Under control of its electric motor, the hatch swung out from the bulkhead until it struck their bodies and stopped. The men pushed and shoved against unyielding space armor and the amorphous bulk of the shelter-balloon, shouting: "Make room!" and "Out of my way, you idiot!" Using her smaller frame to advantage, B'Elanna was able to wriggle free of the crush, pushing herself through the outer hatchway which then shut smoothly behind her. For a terrifying moment she was sliding off the hull to her doom before Rico grabbed hold of her until her magheel boots could get a grip.

Her death had only been delayed a few minutes, B'Elanna knew. By the time they pressurized the air-lock, got everyone out, closed the inner hatch and pumped out the air so they could open the outer hatch again it would be too late. She felt a surprising sense of calm, observing the chaos of battle around her with detachment. She saw Hogan clasped in the jaws of a giant lizard-creature, biting and rending until his air-tanks burst and blew them both to pieces. Bendara was feeding an ammunition belt into a recoilless machine gun that VanBuskirk had clamped under his arm, ten-inch flames spurting from the muzzle and recoil ports. Rico's burner had run dry with no more hydrogen to fuel the atomic chamber; he tossed it aside and reverted to his rescue axe until something monstrous rose from the Psiborg corpses piled about him: severed heads with living brains whose control wires had inserted into mammalian vertebrae and the mandibles of crustaceans, the eyes of insectoids and the claws and teeth of reptilians—an amalgamation of terrors that rolled over Rico like a nightmarish tumbleweed, drawing his body into itself, harvesting flesh and metal alike for its unstoppable onslaught. B'Elanna screamed and pulled the trigger of her submachine gun, emptying an entire clip of explosive bullets to no avail. She hit the firing stud but nothing happened; she had thrown away her jetpack and there was nowhere left to run...

A rocket-propelled mooring line shot past B'Elanna and slammed into the creature, the writhing sparks of the brush discharge lighting up the abomination in all its horror. Convulsing from the shock, it lost its grip on the hull and plunged into the depths of the docking bay, still throwing out control wires in a futile attempt to assimilate anything in reach.

Captain Janeway was leaning out of the air-lock hatch, the crimson shreds of the decompression balloon streaming around her like tattered banners, an oxymask her only protection. She dropped the rocket launcher, fumbling with swollen fingers as the fluids inside her body boiled in the vacuum. B'Elanna shoved her back inside then nearly fell off the hull again as something slammed into _Voyager_ like the hammer of Vulcan, crushing Terran and Psiborg alike with the irresistible force of a pressor beam. B'Elanna dived into the air-lock and yanked the red-handled lever, and as the outer hatch slid shut she witnessed a final horror—the crushed remnants of Bendara and VanBuskirk rising into the air only to slam down on the hull again, over and over, the entire vessel ringing with each impact.

Even in the depths of _Voyager_ they could feel the pounding, the Bridge crew shaking in their couches, held in place only by their safety webbing. The air was stifling as heat built up inside the hull with no means of purging it. Every alarm would be clamoring if they hadn't already been switched off, but no-one could silence the shriek of tortured metal or TuV'k's mad ranting as he convulsed at his station: "Resistance is futile... resistance is futile... resistance is futile..."

"Someone shut him up!" shouted Chakotay, showing none of his usual reserve. It looked like his command of _Voyager_ was going to be short and final. The repeaters on his lap console warned of temperature overloads, radiation leaks and an ammunition count that was getting lower by the second. "Ensign Vor'K, take over at Tactical Psionics! Get me a firing solution on whatever's projecting those gravity beams!"

"I can't lock on!" the young ensign stammered. "Resistance is futile... resistance is futile..."

"Ops, get me a target! Radar, gravimeters, anything!"

"Sensory instruments are down!" Kim's face was pale, and from the way he cradled his right arm he appeared to have broken it. "The transistors on the Computer Deck have fused... some kind of electromagnetic pulse..."

"So much for modern technology. Sparks, get through to those marines! I need a target spotter!"

"Sir, I'm not receiving telemetering from any spacesuit outside the hull."

Chakotay's hands clenched on his armrests. They were all dead: Janeway, Torres, the gunners and marines and the Maquis soldiers he had sent with them. They'd done their best, but now he had to save whatever crew he had left. He could see the gaping iris on the forward-view telescreen, still glowing from the atomic explosion, Psiborgs swarming to repair the damage heedless of the radiation. If only they could get free of those traction beams...

"Mr. Paris, engage the Cochrane Drive!" Chakotay ordered. He jammed down the PA toggle. _"This is the captain! All hands, brace for immediate acceleration!"_

"Is he crazy?" gasped Kim. "We're still inside the cube-ship!"

Paris gave a mirthless laugh. "Hyun, let me show you what I found out the hard way on Deimos. Every reaction drive makes an equal and opposite weapon!"

He slammed the levers past the safety stops and a lance of pure white flame shot out from the rocket-tubes, punching clean through the side of the cube-ship. _Voyager_ sprang free and it was only the finely-honed reflexes of their helmsman that saved them from disaster as the rocketship flashed across the docking bay and through the entry iris into Outer Space.

Their relief was short-lived. No sooner were they clear of the cube-ship when another gravity beam seized hold of _Voyager_.

"Resistance is futile," intoned TuV'k and Vor'K in unison. "You will be assimilated."

"You would think they'd have had enough," said Chakotay through gritted teeth. "Paris, maximum thrust! Give it everything we have!"

"That could tear the hull apart!" Kim protested.

"Then tear it apart!"

"Chakotay," said a quiet voice beside him, "purge Cargo Bay One."

Chakotay turned his head to stare in astonishment at the woman clambering through the tween-deck scuttle. Janeway was barely recognizable, her face bruised and swollen and her head looking like one of his ancestors had taken a scalping knife to it.

"Do you realize what you're saying? That cube is not just a spaceship; it's an entire city... maybe an entire civilization!"

"Better than an entire galaxy," said Janeway, strapping herself into an acceleration couch. "Do it."

Not trusting himself to speak, Chakotay nodded to Ensign Kim, who used his undamaged hand to flick several switches on his console. On _Voyager_ 's outer hull, a loading hatch slid aside and pneumatic rams forced the contents of the cargo bay into the void: a blue sphere bound in the interwoven coils of an electromagnetic field generator. Grim warnings in a dozen languages were stamped on every surface: DANGER: CONTRATERRENE, NO STEP MAGNETIC BOOTS, and MAINTAIN POWER: FAIL-DEADLY SYSTEM. Without any thrusters to resist the pull of the gravity beam, the sphere shot back towards the cube-ship, its electromagnetic fields shutting down one after the other as they rapidly drained the power of the micratomic backup battery.

"Resistance is futile," TuV'k and Vor'K were saying, "Resistance is__" and then they stopped as a savage jolt hurled everyone back into their couches.

By the time Paris was able to skew-flip _Voyager_ to begin the process of deceleration, and the blast shield on the astrodome was retracted so their electronic telescopes could see what had happened to the cube-ship, they were thousands of miles away and unable to make out much. Radar detected an extensive field of debris, but there was no thermal signature from power or life support systems.

No-one suggested they go back and look for survivors.

**Epilogue: STARSHIP VOYAGER**

_BENDARA, KURT. Maquis rebel (paroled). Telfas mining colony, Ceres._

_BENNET, RICHARD. Spacefleet Ensign. Sydney, Autonomous Region of Australia, People's Republic of Greater China._

_CAREY, JOSEPH. Spacefleet Tech Lieutenant. War refugee, Belfast, United Ireland._

_DURST, PETE. Spacefleet Gunner's Mate. New Chicago, United Megacities of America._

_HOGAN, MATTHEW. Maquis rebel (paroled). Space Station DS-9._

_RICO, JUAN. Corporal, United Nations Space Marines. SeaDome-7, Republic of the Philippines._

_SUDER, LON. Maquis rebel (paroled). Martian citizen (naturalized), place of birth unknown._

_VANBUSKIRK, PETER. Sergeant, United Nations Space Marines. New Holland, Venus._

Beneath the list of the dead were thirty-six other names with injuries ranging from broken bones to radiation exposure. Though the experience of the Third World War had greatly advanced the treatment of the latter, she would not be the only member of the crew who would need regular check-ups over the next few decades. Captain Janeway crumpled the print-out in her hands. "Joe Carey is dead?"

"There was a radiation leak in the Power Room," said Chakotay. "They had to evacuate. Carey stayed behind to ensure we'd have power to the Cochrane Drive when we needed it."

"I don't know what to say..." Janeway looked up at the two officers floating in the middle of her cabin. "No, that's wrong. I'll begin by thanking you for saving my life, then ask why eight men had to die in exchange. I'll ask why you disobeyed a direct order _and risked the lives of every man and woman on board my ship!"_

"It wasn't your ship," was Chakotay's calm response. "I was the captain of _Voyager_ and I made the decision. I hear there are three rules about being a Spacefleet captain: always keep your coverall zipped up, go down with the ship, and never abandon__"

"Oh, shut up!"

Janeway reached for her coffeemaker, then realized she'd seen the last of her coffee disappearing down the gullet of the Hirogen Alpha. She opened the drawer for a packet of Spaceport Classic, then remembered the Autodoc had told her not to smoke until her lungs had recovered from her decompression injuries. She slammed the drawer shut and glared at Chakotay.

"I wasn't some damsel in distress that needed rescuing; I surrendered myself to the Caretaker so this crew could get back to Earth! Who are you to make that decision for all of them?"

"Captain Chakotay did not act alone," stated TuV'k. "I seconded his decision, and noted that in the ship's log."

_'Of course you did,'_ thought Janeway, studying the Martian. His features were as impassive as an Adept could make them. Asking whether logic or emotion had swayed his action would be regarded as an insult, she knew.

"I don't recall anyone objecting," said Chakotay, "though I admit we didn't have time to conduct a poll. After _Voyager_ passed through the black star portal we found ourselves in some kind of... galactic transport hub, for want of a better term. Thousands of conduits to every part of the galaxy, including our own Solar System... but there was also a convoy heading back to the Array, so I ordered Mr. Paris to skew-flip _Voyager_ and follow them in. Then it was just a matter of persuading the Caretaker to send us after you. That was easier than I expected; we found him barricaded inside the torpedo room of a Hirogen warship while their Alpha was running amok outside with an overly-large hunting rifle. The Caretaker was quite willing to help us, once I convinced him you were the only one who knew the antidote for the berserker drug you used to infect the Alpha."

"Berserker drug???"

"Turns out the Hirogen aren't used to coffee."

Janeway sunk her head into her hands. Her scalp itched where the hair was growing back under her wig. _'A bald captain'_ , she thought grouchily. _'Maybe I'll start a fad'._

"It's far more likely the Caretaker was trying to get you all killed," she said. "He may well have succeeded. We're light-years from the nearest star system, we have no idea how to activate the black star portal to take us home, and we blew up the only available vessel capable of traversing interstellar space."

Chakotay and TuV'k exchanged a look.

"Unless there's something you gentlemen haven't told me?"

"It appears that while they were on the Array," said TuV'k, "several members of our crew managed to acquire the essential components of a spacewarp drive."

"WHAT?! Who? How?"

"I'd say it was a classic Maquis operation, but there were Spacefleet people involved as well," said Chakotay. "They traded some vids from _Voyager_ 's library for access to the engineering areas of a K'Zon warship that was being repaired in spacedock. The Caretaker wasn't joking when he said his people were obsessed with collecting esoterica. Turns out the Briori are crazy about alien cultural works."

"Cultural works? You mean Plato, Shakespeare, Ayn Rand?"

"Well... more like game shows, soap operas and baseball commentary. And there was a documentary on Chicago Mobs of the 1920's that they really seemed to like."

Janeway was incredulous. "Let me get this straight. You're telling me that a technologically-advanced species sold us the secret of faster-than-light travel in exchange for... for the World Series and _I Love Lucy: The Next Generation_?"

"Well, not sold, exactly..."

"I believe 'theft' and 'bribery' are the correct words in Terran-English," said TuV'k.

"That Wix'Iban fellow had a brother's brother's uncle who did the scutwork in the Power Room," explained Chakotay, "and he left some hatches unlocked, then Seska paid off the Briori security supervisor, B'Elanna and Carey removed the components, and Tom Paris happened to be nearby in a shuttleboat..."

"So they pirated a pirate ship—very apropos. How does that help us? You can't just plug an alien gadget into a Spacefleet console and fold space at a whim! It could take years to work out the principles behind this technology!"

"B'Elanna is confident that with the help of the eggheads and the Glowing Gang, she can create a tractable bubble of warped space large enough to encompass the entire ship." Chakotay removed a sheet of graph paper from his pocket and floated it across to Janeway, who snatched it out of the air. It was an engineer's sketch of _Voyager_ encircled by a pair of giant metal tori, connected to the hull by slim spokes.

"We'd have to construct it ourselves of course, without the help of a spacedock. Fortunately most of the Belters have experience in space construction work, and Cargo Bay Two has the raw material we need. We might not be able to cross the galaxy in a single bound like that cube-ship, but we could travel to the nearest star system in less than a week. I had Astrogation and Computer Deck crunch the numbers, and they reckon _Voyager_ could get back to Earth within our lifetime."

"How long exactly?"

"Seventy-five years at maximum acceleration, give or take..."

"SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS?!"

"Which is a lot better than never," Chakotay forged on. "Even if only our children or grandchildren made it back home, they would have a better future among their own kind than in some isolated colony struggling on the verge of extinction."

"There are other considerations," said TuV'k. "We now know that our Solar System has attracted the attention of hostile alien forces. We would be delivering a much-needed technological advance to the Tri-World Federation, and forewarning them of the dangers they might face."

_'That wasn't what the two of you were saying earlier,'_ Janeway thought. Their encounter with the Psiborg Collective had clearly given them all a kick in their complacency. "It appears you have everything worked out,” she said sardonically. “What do you need me for?"

"A decision," said Chakotay. "You're the captain of _Voyager_ now. Do we set course for the Solar System, or find a habitable planet and settle down?"

Janeway pursed her lips. On her desktop videograph Mark and Mollie frolicked in their never-ending loop. Family or Duty? Groundside or Outer Space? She had been given this choice before, but this time the stakes were much higher. Like any rocketship that had to operate billions of miles from the nearest planet, _Voyager_ was designed to be easily repaired, self-sufficient in food and power and oxygen, habitable for years in an emergency. But what her officers were proposing was something their designers had never anticipated.

It meant decades on a rocketship that was never meant to be an ark, their lives dependent on alien technology that could leave them marooned in the unfathomable void between the stars, crossing a galaxy that might well prove dangerous in ways beyond their understanding. The dangers they did know of were bad enough: cosmic radiation, space madness, space piracy—as long as the Briori controlled the galaxy-spanning portal network they would be in danger from K'Zon pirates or Hirogen hunters. And who knew if the Psiborg Collective had been truly destroyed?

Perhaps it would be better to establish a colony—that Second Foundation of Man—but that brought its own risks. It meant landing _Voyager_ on a planet and dismantling the ship for building materials, using its reactor to power a community but leaving them vulnerable to orbital bombardment by any passing aggressor. It meant raising children on a world where the biology would be innately hostile, evolved to co-exist with completely different forms of life. Or perhaps they could cast aside the Prime Directive and assimilate into an extraterran culture on a civilized world, become aliens adrift in a sea of aliens. Whatever resulted would not be human and know nothing of Earth.

Whatever course they chose, their chances were so slim they would need more than luck, skill and determination to succeed; they would need resolve beyond the point of reason, to continue on when both logic and emotion dictated it would be better to just give up. And once they had set forth it would not be easy to stop after blood and sweat had been invested. The same pioneer stubbornness that would get them home or found a colony against all odds would make it difficult to change their course should it be necessary.

Janeway keyed the PA toggle. _"Now hear this. This is the captain speaking. All hands not currently on watch or in Sickbay are to muster in the messdeck."_

Some of those in Sickbay turned up regardless: Hyun Kim with his arm in a cast, Keshari guiding a man with bandaged eyes, Chell in a life-support stretcher carried by a couple of marines. B'Elanna Torres was there with a dozen members of the Glowing Gang, trying to look confident in the uniform of a newly-frocked Tech Lieutenant (j.g.). There was Majel Barrett with her computers and electronicists; Annika Hansen with her astrogators, chartsmen and stereographic interpreters; Dr. Zimmerman and his cosmologists, xenologists, xenolinguists, labtechs and psychotechs. There were gunners and torpedomen, radarmen and commtechs, yeomen and clerks, stewards and cooks, space-jockeys and technos and jetmen. Men and women from Antarctica to Zanzibar, from Mars and Venus and the Belt and colonies that only veteran spacers had ever heard of. Janeway was annoyed but not surprised to see Nee'Lix was still on board despite her orders, hanging from a null-gee strap by his tail and arguing with Cookie over the correct way to stew tomatoes. Even the Autodoc had turned up, stubbornly insisting it had become Chief Medical Officer by default and therefore had a right to attend crew briefings. "You're an Autodoc, not an officer!" she had replied, but had let the robot stay.

Some of the crew had started pairing off, Janeway noticed. Seska was whispering in the ear of Michael Jonas, and B'Elanna had attracted several admirers including Tom Paris and Ensign Vor'K. _('A man from Mars with a woman from Venus?'_ she thought, _'That never works!')_ She would have to give some discreet advice to the girl about handling personal relationships when you were a Spacefleet officer. And what of herself? She eyed Chakotay as he handed her the wireless handset to relay her words to the rest of the ship. Thought of a man called Mark and a dog called Mollie, too distant in space and time.

"We are alone," said Captain Janeway, "in an uncharted part of the galaxy. Already we have made enemies and taken losses. But we've made some friends as well, risked all to save each others' lives, come together as one crew in the face of fear and danger. And it is as that crew we shall face whatever adversity lies ahead. I've been informed that even at maximum acceleration it will take seventy-five years to reach our Solar System, but I'm not willing to settle for that. We know there are aliens out there with the ability to get us home a lot faster, and we'll be looking for them; we'll be seeking every technology and opportunity that can help us. And in doing so we shall expand the frontiers of our understanding of the Universe, we shall discover worlds and civilizations undreamed of. We shall live up to the name of _Voyager_ , by boldly going where no-one has gone before."

Someone started clapping; Janeway thought it was B'Elanna but she couldn't be sure as the others joined in, a thunderous applause filling the room. She could hear them over the intercraft as well, the entire ship resounding with cheers of acclamation. Not too long ago they had been trying to kill each other. Now they were her crew, the crew of the rocketship... no, make that the starship _Voyager_.

And together, they would find a way home.

THE END


End file.
